hi everyone and welcome back to my channel on this week's video we're going to be talking about something that I don't think is talked enough and talked about enough in Academia when you start your PhD project for the first time especially if you haven't done any sort of big research experiences before and that is the lab [Music] notebook [Music] okay so I think we should start with probably the easiest question and that is what is a lab notebook a lab notebook is many things but most importantly it is a legal document you no it sounds
like really official it's all very serious we got to make sure we're keeping our lab books correctly a lab notebook is not only important for you as a scientist because it is a personal record of what You' have done in that day but it also protects your research and your intellectual property it becomes a permanent record of what you have done any exciting discoveries that you have made your results everything is documented in this lab notebook so people know you've done it is also super important for when you come to publish papers let's say you've
come to publish a paper and you're looking back at your data results and you're like how much did I add here what was my exposure time and I know you think you can remember these things but you can't so it's really important to write it down in your lab notebook it's also useful for when you come to repeat experiments that you can make sure that you've done exactly the same thing each time or if you're training somebody new in the lab and they're like how do I do this then you can go back to a
lab notebook and be like this is how you do it I literally treat my lab book like a diary like a scrapbook every single detail of my day is written down in this lab notebook from when I got into the lab to what I did that day to stuff that didn't work to what I'm thinking about maybe trying next week or hey this is a kind of wacky idea that I found any gel image that I take I print it out and I stick it in my lab book any important things I print out and
I stick it in my lab notebook and actually that's kind of fun I think of it as like scrapbook where you're like cutting out stuff and sticking it in it's kind of a fun little way of keeping track of your work but that's how I view it anyway so now I want to talk a little bit about how you should act not how you should who am I to tell you how you should lay out your lab notebook that is between you and your professor and whatever the standard is in your lab I know a
lot of labs actually now have electronic lab notebooks maybe you use an iPad rather than a traditional notebook it's whatever's been decided like your personal preference or like you and your Pi I in no way saying that this is the only way you should keep a lab notebook however I'm going to share how I keep a lab notebook so my typic difficult layout look something like this I start with the date obviously then I list what project this is part of I know that as a PhD student you probably got a million and one different
projects on the go so it's nice to have a project over you at the top of the page like which project you're mainly going to be working on today then I moved down and I list an aim for my day so what are the key experiments I'm looking at getting done today and what are the key questions I'm looking at answering in today's lot of experiments then we move on to the actual experimental section of the lab notebook so I'll write down my methods what I'm planning on doing the reagents that I'm using how much
I'm adding what temperature it's at what PH it's at in that little method section the next bit I think is quite easy to overlook because you know when you get your results you're kind of either excited about it or not so excited about it and then it's hard to write that down in your lab notebook try and force yourself to write down the results at this point I'll do my little scrapbooking thing and I'll if I've got an image or something that I can print out then I'll print that out and stick that in to
kind of support the results from earlier and then I finish off with a little plan section so interpretation of the results what I think this means so that's kind of how I lay out my La Notebook on a typical day so what I would also like to add here is other things that might be worth including in your lab notebook uh so the first thing is uh records of the brand and lot numbers or like product code of the reagents that you're using I know now a lot of journals are asking for like the list
of reagents that you use and the exact same ones and it can be kind of easy to overlook initially write down as much information about the product as you can the other thing is uh order information to say if you order a new Jean or order a new set of primers or something uh sticking in the primer information or the order information can be super handy just to flip back more for yourself than anything and then finally the other thing I want to talk briefly about is less of a lav notebook thing but something I
found extremely helpful during my PhD so this is like a top tip that I discovered and that is having a master PowerPoint slide deck for each project you know when you get your data or you get your images you get your gel you've taken microscope images you've got graphs you've got whatever this data is your raw data copy and paste them into this master PowerPoint with the date that way you could easily correspond to the page in your lab notebook and it just makes it so much easier when you do come to write a paper
or pull all your results together that you've got them all in one place it also makes me um helps me track my progress and you can easily flick back to key results that maybe you can't necessarily cut and stick in your lab notebook so it's just very easy to uh keep track that way ah okay so that brings us to the end of another video hope that you found this helpful just a little introduction again this is no way the only way of doing this and it definitely should be a conversation that you have with
your adviser or your lab but just a kind of rough idea of how I generally keep a lab notebook and the importance of keeping one I hope it's been helpful if you like this and want to see more PhD content please don't forget to like And subscribe hit the Subscribe button somewhere down there and I'll see you guys next week for another video bye
