Scientists have long depended on pen and paper to record their observations, filling volumes of lab notebooks with their work. While Charles Darwin’s drawings and diagrams or Albert Einstein’s equations may be inspirational, the reality of handwritten notebooks is that they can stifle, rather than encourage, scientific progress.
Keeping a lab notebook up to date is a tedious and time-consuming task, which tempts some scientists into taking shortcuts. For example, when researchers repeat an assay, they may rewrite their protocols in a way that is messy and unclear, or they may skip this step completely and not record the small modifications that made their experiments a success.
New technologies and high-throughput analyses make experiments more complex and increase data output. Scientists add data to their lab notebooks in the form of handwritten values, printed and pasted graphs and images, or references to large data files stored on a hard drive. ...
