BISC219/F11:Guidelines for maintaining your lab notebook

Keeping a Lab Notebook

You must purchase and maintain a lab notebook for this class. Although your lab notebook will not be graded or checked, it will be an important and useful resource for you when you write the scientific research reports on your projects. If you don't keep a careful record of the progress of your experiments in your lab notebook, it will be much harder for you to write about your findings because you will have to try to reconstruct and locate information about the experiments after the fact.

Many scientific companies require that their employee’s laboratory notebooks be dated, signed, and witnessed since notebooks can be used as evidence in a patent dispute to establish the timing of a discovery. You will not be required to have your notebooks witnessed, but the front cover should have your name and lab section and each page of your notebook should have a page number and date. You must use a pen to write in your lab notebook. It would not be of much use as a legal document, if it were written in pencil.

There are many ways to organize a lab notebook but, for this course, an exclusively chronological approach is not the best scheme. Leave a few blank pages at the front of the notebook and start a table of contents that has three parts: Series 1- Patterns of Inheritance, Series 2-Forward Genetics, and Series 3-Reverse Genetics. Number all the pages in your lab notebook before the first lab. Divide your notebook into 3 sections, one for each of the 3 projects you will do this semester. Place Tabs at the beginning of each series section. You can divide the notebook into three equal sections, or give the most pages to series 2. Start the Table of Contents, leaving a lot of room for sub-headings under each of the Series headings. Fill in the page numbers for the beginning of each Series.

Many find it useful to make a schematic diagram of the procedure (called a “flow diagram”) in their notebooks, which can be referred to while performing the experiments. It is important to write a complete hypothesis and procedure from the lab manual into your notebooks, as some of you who have taken Chemistry here at Wellesley may have done. Your lab instructor may provide you with more specific information on how to format your lab notebook.

Your lab notebook is the place to record what you actually did in lab, so if there were any changes that you made to the procedure or any unexpected happenings during lab (for example a water bath at 30°C, when it was supposed to be 37°C), then be sure to write these things down in your notebook. Don’t expect to remember exactly what happened later, since chances are good that you won’t.

Your notebook is also the place to perform any calculations and to record all your data. It is much more difficult to recreate what you’ve done in lab if parts of your experiments are written on scraps of paper instead of in your notebook. Since science is founded on the ability to reproduce the results of an experiment, it is vital that the details of the experiment be accurately and completely recorded.

Your notebook is the best resource for writing your papers, especially the Materials and Methods section. If what you did and how you did it is right in front of you writing this cumbersome section should not be difficult.

For a downloadable handout: Media:Notebook guidelines2.doc