The laboratory notebook in the 21 st century

Detailed note‐keeping is a prerequisite for, if not a key component of, scientific discovery. An unrecorded experiment is lost to the world even if it sparks a great idea in a scientist's mind: Additional work is needed to reproduce and confirm the original observation and to test the hypothesis by novel experimental strategies. Hence, a detailed record of the experimental setup, observations, and analysis is a crucial requirement for presenting a new discovery to the scientific community. > An unrecorded experiment is lost to the world even if it sparks a great idea in a scientist's mind… For centuries, scientists have been using paper notebooks. However, the digital revolution has changed every aspect of data handling: Acquisition has become automated, primary data exist in a huge variety of formats and require vast memory space, and analysis increasingly uses sophisticated software. While electronic note‐keeping has become state of the art in the pharmaceutical industry, it is by far not the standard in academic life‐science laboratories. In fact, digital record‐keeping has been controversial in academia, and hence, its implementation has been lagging. We argue that many academic laboratories will soon abolish the current precarious mixture of digital data and paper‐based annotation. We see three main reasons for this trend. First, the vast majority of the data generated by a scientist will be in digital form that has to be documented and archived; however, the paper‐based laboratory notebook does not enable convenient documentation of folder structures and data paths. Second, ongoing efforts aim to standardize experimental protocols and data formats in order to improve their general comparability and re‐analysis of data, which make standardization more attractive for scientists. In fact, standardization is a prerequisite for using an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN). Third, long‐term data storage, an essential component of good scientific practice, easily turns …