The Lab Notebook

One fine future day, you or one of your classmates will make an important discovery and will seek a patent. The lab notebook is your legal record of your discovery. For this purpose, each page in your notebook should be signed and dated. Anything of potential importance should also be signed and dated by a second person. 

The critical functions of your lab notebook are to state what you did and what you observed, and it should be understandable by a stranger. The greatest error, made even by experienced scientists, is writing incomplete or unintelligible notebooks. Using complete sentences is an excellent way to prevent incomplete descriptions. 

Beginning students often find it useful to write a complete description of an experiment, with sections dealing with purpose, methods, results, and conclusions. Arranging a notebook to accept numerical data prior to coming to the lab is an excellent way to prepare for an experiment. It is good practice to write a balanced chemical equation for every reaction you use. This practice helps you understand what you are doing and may point out what you do not understand about what you are doing. 

The measure of scientific truth is the ability of different people to reproduce an experiment. A good lab notebook will state everything that was done and what you observed and will allow you or anyone else to repeat the experiment. 

Record in your notebook the names of computer files where programs and data are stored. Paste hard copies of important data into your notebook. The lifetime of a printed page is an order of magnitude (or more) greater than the lifetime of a computer disk. 

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While you should keep your notebooks out of harm s way during an experiment, the lab notebook rightfully belongs at the bench, and not the desk. Record data directly into the book, rather than commiting data to memory or temporarily using a sheet of paper (or worse, a paper towel) in place of the notebook itself. 

The lab notebook must (1) state what was done (2) state what was observed and (3) be understandable to a stranger. 

Forty minutes after administration of the conservative first dose, less than fifty words along in his efforts to record observations, came a far more powerful reaction the first intentional human experience of LSD. Hofmann was unable to continue his description in the lab notebook as "die last words could only be written with great difficulty ... 

In connection with the notebook, which may be of significance, another valuable statement can be the conception records or patent proposals or disclosure sheets, or whatever other name is given to the formalized documents submitted by laboratory workers to a patent attorney or agent. The signature thereon may also become of great legal significance. Here, as well as in notebooks, a clear and concise description of the invention is important, but in contrast to the notebook, it can be more clearly directed to the point of invention than can the lab notebook which only serves to record step-by-step procedures, failures, and observations of no future importance. The conception record should ... 

For practicing analytical chemists and on-the-job apphcations, it is especially important to use the lab notebooks for entering observations and measurements directly. Complete documentation is essential for forensic or industrial laboratories for legal or patent considerations. In industrial research labs, the notebook must generally be signed (witnessed) and dated by another person familiar with the work to assure legal patent priority if applicable. 

Finally, we cannot end a chapter on the basic tools of analytical chemistry without mentioning the laboratory notebook. Your laboratory notebook is your most important tool when working in the lab, providing a complete record of all your work. If kept properly, you should be able to look back at your laboratory notebook several years from now and reconstruct the experiments on which you worked. 

Time spent in complying with regulatory and legal issues, for instance, completing the paper notebook write-up of an experiment, is time taken out of the lab and is therefore time not spent making new discoveries. Shortening the time taken to both set up new experiments and document experimental outcomes will therefore have a direct and positive impact on scientific productivity. 

From the laboratory notebook. Alchem Lab Bulls, no. 13 (Q4 1962). rhttp //www.spagyria.com/alb.zip1. 

V. Procedure It is not necessary to copy the procedure from the lab manual. Such work is busy work and accomplishes nothing but taking up room in the notebook. Instead, you may simply say, Refer to. .. and list the lab in standard bibliographic style. 

Lab notebooks should be permanently bound, with all pages numbered. Reserve the first 3-4 pages for a fully annotated Table of Contents. This will speed up data retrieval when you re rushing to complete a required report or to beat the competition in submitting a manuscript for publication. 

There has been a general field acceptance of a manual audit trail (in effect, a duplicate lab notebook) for established systems that were developed prior to the audit trail requirement. Presumably, however, this acceptance of a manual trail is a short-term alternative. 

There are many other advantages to using the schematic capture version. The enormous popularity of the Microsoft Windows operating system should attest to the ease of use of a graphics-based interface compared to a text-based interface. One such advantage is automatic documentation. When you simulate a circuit, you automatically have a circuit schematic. This schematic can be incorporated into lab notebooks and reports. In a corporate environment, documentation of this type is extremely important. With the Windows operating system, the schematics can be incorporated into written documents using screen captures. This manual is an example of what can be accomplished. 

Your lab partner has measured the mass of your sample to be 2,500 g. How can you record this more nicely (without scientific notation) in your lab notebook using a metric system prefix ... 

Dr. Geekmajor absentmindedly measures the mass of a sample to be 0.75 lb and records his measurement in his lab notebook. His astute lab assistant, who wants to save the doctor some embarrassment, knows that there are 2.2 lb in every kilogram. The assistant quickly converts the doctor s measurement to SI units. What does she get ... 

Documentation means labeling. If your spreadsheet cannot be read by another person without your help, it needs better documentation. (The same is true of your lab notebook )... 

Safety requires you to think in advance about what you will do never do anything that seems dangerous. Know how to use safety equipment such as goggles, fume hood, lab coat, gloves, emergency shower, eyewash, and fire extinguisher. Chemicals should be stored and used in a manner that minimizes contact of solids, liquids, and vapors with people. Environmentally acceptable disposal procedures should be established in advance for every chemical that you use. Your lab notebook tells what you did and what you observed it should be understandable to other people. It also should allow you to repeat an experiment in the same manner in the future. You should understand the principles of operation of electronic and mechanical balances and treat them as delicate equipment. Buoyancy corrections are required in accurate work. Burets should be read in a reproducible manner and drained slowly for best results. Always interpolate between markings to obtain accuracy one deci-... 

The order in which these and other science-oriented activities are performed are wholly up to the scientist, as illustrated by the wheel of scientific inquiry in Figure 1.5. No cookbooks. No algorithms of logic. Just equipment, a blank lab notebook, some self-discipline, and a healthy dose of creative curiosity. This is the scientific spirit. 

Researchers are often uncertain about the scope of descripdon of their experiments to be included when preparing a lab notebook. First of all, it is important to realize that the laboratory notebook serves not only for corroboradon of the reduc-... 

Years of working with radioactive elements in the lab left Marie and Pierre Curie very sick as well. In 1934, Marie Curie died of a blood disease caused by exposure to radiation. When scientists examined her lab notebooks many decades later, they uncovered her glowing and toxic fingerprints everywhere. 

Preventative Action. This observation could have been avoided by developing a laboratory SOP that describes proper documentation for all analyses conducted, including stability. Additionally, QA within the lab should have provided adequate oversight and monitoring of stability data generated by individual analysts through periodic reviews of laboratory notebooks. 

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