Electronic laboratory notebooks aren't just for industry anymore. Many ELNs now are priced for academia, "and rapidly it's coming to the point where science cannot be done without it," says Douglas Perry, professor of informatics at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Large companies typically use ELNs to standardize quality control or establish a legal data trail; academic labs use them to gain searchable access to years' worth of data or the ability to share data easily. But ELNs are not only about moving from paper to electronic notebooks, says Ian Murrell of the Klee Group in France, which produces the Kalabie ELN. "They occupy an important position where knowledge is created out of experiment data, and where collaborative work can be organized."
So, do you need an ELN? Ask yourself these four questions.
1. Do you generate high-throughput or automated data?
Ellen Quardokus, a research associate at Indiana University, had used ...
