Record Keeping
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Both experimental and computational scientists in the lab must keep a detailed chronological notebook of their work. We find that experimental scientists are used to doing this, but computational scientists less so.
Both computational and lab researchers should have a One Drive electronic lab notebook.
Information on how to organise that can be found here:
You must maintain a chronologically organized lab notebook. This is a document that resides on OneNote. Entries in the notebook should be dated, and they should be relatively verbose, with links or embedded images or tables displaying the results of the work that you performed. In addition to describing precisely what you did, the notebook should record your observations, conclusions, and ideas for future work. Particularly when something turns out badly, it is tempting simply to link the final plot or table of results and move on. Before doing that, it is important to document how you know the work failed, since the interpretation of your results may not be obvious to someone else reading your lab notebook.
In addition to the primary text describing your computation/lab experiments, it is often valuable to transcribe notes from conversations as well as e-mail text into the lab notebook. These types of entries provide a complete picture of the development of the project over time.
All data from an experiment must either be embedded in the OneNote or linked to the data's location on the NAS if it is too large to embed in OneDrive directly. This should be of high enough quality to make accessible to remote collaborators to give them status updates on the project.
Your lab book is a record of what you’ve done during your time in the Mitchell Lab. This is a document that will stay in the group after you’ve gone, and should be written in a way that future group members can pick up your lab book and understand exactly what you did in an experiment and why.
Rules for keeping a tidy lab book:
Use the contents page. Your lab book has several pages at the start where you should write the title you’ve given to each experiment and what page you’ve written it on. This will make it much easier to find a specific experiment when you or someone else wants to!
Try to write up as you go along. This makes it easier to keep up-to-date and ensures you’ll remember exactly what you did and why.
Write up all your experiments, including the ones that didn’t work or you made a mistake.
Start a new page for each experiment. This includes repeats of previous experiments.
Every page should have:
Date. This is very important, and you shouldn’t change anything you’ve written on the page without adding the date that you made the changes.
Title. e.g. “Immunofluorescent staining of RelA following TLR9 stimulation in RIVA cells”.
References (if applicable)
Aim/justification of what you’re doing. This can be a single sentence, just enough to inform whoever’s reading it why you did this experiment.
Explanation of what you did. This can be brief, and may refer back to previous pages (e.g. “this was performed exactly as described on p.27”). If it’s the first time you did the protocol, write it out in full. Make sure to note any deviations from a usual protocol or write down if anything went wrong!
Summary of results. This can be a brief written description of what you observed, or you can stick in a graph/picture (see below).
Any calculations you performed. Remember that your lab book isn’t just for you, other people need to be able to look at it and understand where the numbers come from!
This should be done as soon as possible after sharing the results. It helps Simon plan your projects, papers and grants to keep the lab funded!
If you present at group meeting please place your slides on the NAS in the Shared -> groupMeetingSlides folder.
Whenever you show slides or results, at group meeting or 1-on-1 with Simon, please save the slides/notebook/whatever you showed into your OneNote lab book and additionally into a folder named "presentations" or "slides" in your working directly, and ensure this directory is .
