Paper and Electronic Lab Notebooks Can Work Together

Below we will address the main points of coexistence between paper and ELNs, based on key findings from my research to see the ways in which an ELN could complement the paper-based lab work and identify areas where there is still room for improvement.

How scientists take notes and organise their work is a highly personal endeavour

Scientists organise their work and take notes in different ways. There are some commonalities in the types of information that is recorded (e.g. dates/experiment numbers) but the processes and organizational structures for these notes differ greatly. Therefore if you are considering creating your own ELN or choosing one to use within your group, it’s important to note that a “one-size-fits-all” approach is not going to cut the mustard, and that customisation and flexibility are key for ELNs.

Today, ELNs offer various ways to write your notes and while some focus solely on note-keeping, other solutions enable you to add even more context to your notes and manage entire projects, inventories and your lab team.

Scientists do use technology to digitise portions of their work despite their continued use of paper

Just because scientists are resistant to or don’t use ELNs doesn’t mean they don’t digitise some (or in some cases a majority of) their work. Whilst the paper notebook is still heavily used inside the lab to take notes, scientists frequently digitise their reports, posters, publications, and use software to analyse and graphically display their experiment data. Additionally the software survey illustrated that chemists do use many different software packages to create structures and diagrams and to aid their research.

We can see that ELNs have transformed in their role, from lab journals towards platforms that can integrate with other systems used in the lab to encompass the broader scope of scientist’s work.

“Scientists’ work varies heavily between fields, methods, equipment availability, and budget to name just a few. Many scientists rely on a number of spreadsheets, notebooks and other systems to track their progress and inventory, which is error-prone and very time-consuming to maintain”, Klemen Zupancic, CEO at SciNote explains. “As the science output increases due to the progress of technology, we will need to build systems that are fully integrated and can automate the data flow.”

Some of the elements of the scientific record that do not get digitised are the things that do not work

Participants stated that the elements in their lab book that didn’t get digitised were the parts of experiments that didn’t work, or alterations to methods and protocols that didn’t have the desired results; suggesting that they wrote up most of their paper notes for working experiments, and that the failed methods were left in the paper lab book. However, it’s worth noting that knowing which approaches do not work can be vitally important, both for the person who initially tried them and particularly for students continuing or referencing their work at a later date.

In the long run, finding old data from previous unsuccessful experiments can be tedious, and sometimes data just gets lost. An ELN can be very useful for knowledge management, by housing all of your project related files (data, notes, results) in one place; this makes it easier to browse and search through these experiments as a whole, years later. Furthermore, this would enable other colleagues to understand what has already been done on a project so work isn’t unnecessarily repeated.

Scientists are much more concerned with backing up electronic work than paper based work

There was a high disparity between electronic and paper backups; electronic backups are commonplace, but typically paper work wasn’t backed up at all. Even the participants who used lab books with carbon pages tended to leave the pages inside the original lab books or would leave them in a drawer in their desk, meaning they were in the same location as their lab book if there were any potential issues such as a fire in the lab. This example was all too real for Southampton students, as this unfortunately happened at our University in 2005 when one of the Electronic and Computer Science research laboratories burned down (see the news article for more details), and lots of valuable research data was lost. It is important to remind scientists that these events do actually occur, and that they need to take precautions against losing their research.

“In order to prevent losses, the first thing researchers can do is take a look at how they back up existing data, whether it is electronic or biological,” says David Silberman, director of the health and safety Programs at Stanford University School of Medicine in Fire Hits UC-Santa Cruz Labs article.

Backups are part and parcel of using an electronic system, therefore an ELN provider should give you the required information about how they back-up your data. However, if you prefer (or require) to keep the information locally at your institution there are ELNs that facilitate standalone installations such that your data can be contained within your institution. An example of this is the University of Southampton’s Labtrove.

Many lab setups aren’t conducive to using electronic devices and a significant ELN adoption barrier is current hardware capabilities

Some lab environments are hostile to technology and unsuitable for ELN usage, either because hazardous chemicals could get spilt on them, or magnets might wipe their hard drives, or because there aren’t safe spaces to put a laptop down. In these situations it’s understandable that paper would be the preferable option. Therefore, if there are situations where scientists would be unwilling or unable to take their electronic devices in the lab irrespective of how good the software was, then the lack of ELN adoption cannot be purely considered as a software problem.

This raises the issue of duplicated data entry, as if the scientists cannot physically use an ELN during their experiments, then they would need to write up their notes into an ELN afterwards, increasing the workload. Furthermore, it seems unlikely in these scenarios currently that scientists would be willing to even trial an ELN based on the hardware barriers. If an ELN was to replace paper, then this issue would need to be addressed, potentially in some cases with cheaper more durable hardware, or better practices where the scientists could still use the devices without being as concerned about them.

Currently, without these procedures in place, there is a limitation to how much an ELN could be fully used throughout a lab, so it might be worth addressing the other software needs first and improving the current digitisation processes before trying to phase paper out.

Cloud based ELNs, even if installed on local servers, can be used on mobile devices as well, which potentially simplifies their use in the lab. They can be accessed from different locations within the lab which also makes it easier for the scientists as they do not have to carry the devices from one place to the next. Even if scientists frequently enter their data after the lab work has been done, the direct input at the lab bench would simplify the process even further.

“Before, I’d have to write everything down, collect the data and format it so that I could print it to fit into the paper notebook. Now I can just save a huge excel into an ELN. In our lab, we even started thinking about tablets to take ELN directly from the office to the bench”, explains David Frommholz, startup co-owner at DALEX Biotech and lab manager at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany in an article about the ELN return of investment.

PhD scientists seemed more in favour of ELNs if they had supervisors who thought they were a good idea or encouraged their usage

Participants with supervisors who favoured the use of ELNs typically regarded them more positively, (notably a postgraduate student with a pro ELN supervisor said she wished she has used one from the beginning). Additionally, some of the students who had better backup procedures in place for their paper lab notebooks were those with supervisors who had insisted on more stringent measures than the students who were left to their own devices.

This shows that we shouldn’t underestimate the concept of “Social Influence”, a factor of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) (Venkatesh et al., 2003) and that supervisors have a special responsibility to embed good note taking, digitisation and backup practices in their students from the beginning.