Lab Notebook Best Practices

We have been using online lab notebooks since 2007 and the platforms and workflows have certainly changed over the years. Below is a compendium of best practices based on our experience and the particular research we do. This is intended for those in our lab group, however comments and suggestions are welcome.

Select an appropriate platform

For most, Wordpress is recommended ie

• http://onsnetwork.org/
• http://safsoa.wordpress.com/
• http://genefish.wordpress.com/

Make sure it is reproducible

Document in a fashion where someone could replicate your work

Document daily

A record of your work should be published the day of activity.

Maintain backup

Have a copy of your notebook in another location. This could be done in several ways.

• composing in text editor and hosting on GitHub
• using IFTTT to post/save entries elsewhere
• run script (ie wget) to archive contents

Follow Data Managment plan

The Data Managment plan provides information on where to store files, how to handle data generated during analysis, and how to create well-documented, and properly named, files and folders.