Lab Notebook

1. Why keep a notebook

Keeping a written lab notebook is a key aspect of moving your research forward. Briefly, here are some reasons why a well-managed notebook is an invaluable tool for your research. A lab notebook helps to:

1. Organize your research progress. Recording both positive and negative results helps keep you on track.
2. Help you to organize your future work and reproduce past experiments.
3. Allows others in the lab to retrace your steps, perhaps years later.
4. Serve as a written record for new ideas or discoveries that may lead to patents.

Take a look at some great advice on how to maintain a great lab notebook. Reference: http://www.iphandbook.org/handbook/ch08/p02/ (dead link)

2. Notebooks in the Finkelstein Lab

Please pick a lab notebook style that fits your needs. However, maintain these minimum criteria to make your lab book a truly useful record for everyone in the lab:

1. Paste in all gels, graphs or figures that are necessary to re-trace your steps
2. Make sure that all lanes, axes, etc are labeled appropriately
3. Number and date every page
4. Use pen

We buy our notebooks from the Eureka Lab Book Company: http://www.eurekalabbook.com/Scientificnotebook.html (dead link)