How To Organize Your Research Notes With A Lab Notebook?

What will you learn?

1. What lab notes are and their role in good research practice
2. Know the key sections of a lab notebook
3. How to make entries in a lab notebook
4. Legal and ethical responsibilities involved with lab notes
5. All you need to know about electronic note-making
6. An overview of documents based on lab notebooks

Course Description

As a researcher, your lab notebook is your most valuable tool and main working document that will include hypotheses, experimental setup, evaluations, data, interpretations, calculations, and early analysis. It is in fact, the first record of your research activity from experiment to observation and must be meticulously maintained.

This structured program highlights several useful tips on the types of sections and entries a researcher should ideally maintain, and the basic thumb rules to follow. It outlines the legal and ethical implications of keeping notes, wraps up with an overview of electronic note-making and documents based on lab notes. The course also dwells on how keeping a well-maintained lab notebook is a good scientific practice and crucial in lab research for organizational and legal purposes.

What topics will you cover?

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. What are lab notes?
4. Legal and ethical implications
5. Design of a lab notebook
6. The front matter
7. The body
8. Non-obligatory rules
9. Electronic laboratory notebooks
10. Documents based on lab notes
11. Summary
12. Check your understanding
13. Further reading

Course Narrator:

Harold Swindall, Academic Trainer

Hal Swindall holds a master's in English and a PhD in comparative literature. For 25 years, he has taught, edited, and researched in East Asia besides scholarly visits to Europe. Presently he works as an English teacher trainer at the University of Malaya in Malaysia, mainly teaching academic writing and research to graduates and supervising TESL theses. Hal has also designed and conducted English academic writing workshops for non-native English speakers, and is performing mixed-method research in this area. Besides all that, he has 25 years of experience in a variety of editing and has helped many scholars publish in major journals. He believes in giving every aspiring researcher the attention and help they need to realize their goals. Hal's languages include French and Italian, besides Chinese, and he has published on such wide-ranging topics as Buddhist art and Chinese poetry, but his dissertation research was on late nineteenth-century artistic prose.