Electronic lab notebooks: can they replace paper?

Abstract

Despite the increasingly digital nature of society there are some areas of research that remain firmly rooted in the past; in this case the laboratory notebook, the last remaining paper component of an experiment. Countless electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) have been created in an attempt to digitise record keeping processes in the lab, but none of them have become a ‘key player’ in the ELN market, due to the many adoption barriers that have been identified in previous research and further explored in the user studies presented here. The main issues identified are the cost of the current available ELNs, their ease of use (or lack of it) and their accessibility issues across different devices and operating systems. Evidence suggests that whilst scientists willingly make use of generic notebooking software, spreadsheets and other general office and scientific tools to aid their work, current ELNs are lacking in the required functionality to meet the needs of the researchers. In this paper we present our extensive research and user study results to propose an ELN built upon a pre-existing cloud notebook platform that makes use of accessible popular scientific software and semantic web technologies to help overcome the identified barriers to adoption.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13321-017-0221-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Uso De Microsoft Onenote Como Cuaderno Electrónico De Laboratorio

“…Los sistemas de registro y reporte de datos científicos son de gran interés para respaldar la reproducibilidad y transparencia científica (Kanza et al, 2017). La investigación experimental actual (Guerrero et al, 2018;Guerrero, Libre, et al, 2016) y la bioinformática (López-Cortés et al, 2018) generan una gran cantidad de datos o imágenes de alta resolución (Batisse et al, 2013) que ya no se pueden documentar utilizando los CLP.…”

“…Kanza y colegas (2017) identificaron 72 CEL activos especializados en disciplinas específicas o en soluciones para todo propósito. En comparación con los CLP, los CEL podrían mejorar la adquisición, intercambio, accesibilidad, registro, incluso la presentación de los datos (Guerrero, Dujardin, et al, 2016;Kanza et al, 2017).…”

“…Esto se debe a la gran cantidad de datos que se manejan en la actualidad y que no se pueden documentar en los CLP. A pesar de que existen muchos CEL en el mercado, gratuitos y de pago (Kanza et al, 2017), muy pocos han sido probados y estudiados por investigadores (Guerrero, Dujardin, et al, 2016). Este trabajo pretende dar una guía a los investigadores que deseen usar OneNote como CEL, basándose en las mejores funcionalidades que debería tener un CEL, con respecto a la adquisición, intercambio y presentación de datos.…”

Support for Electronic Lab Notebooks at Top American Research Universities

“…Kanza and colleagues conducted a survey to assess interest and use of ELNs in academia, finding that only 11% of respondents were using an ELN in their research group, though 76% expressed interest in implementing or learning more about ELNs. Major barriers included limited budgets, concerns about changing existing workflows, time needed for implementation, and concerns about the security of cloud storage (Kanza et al 2017).…”

Standardisation in life-science research - Making the case for harmonization to improve communication and sharing of data amongst researchers

“…Similarly, to laboratory scientists, computational scientists should consider establishing data analysis related SOPs and workflows. Furthermore, the use of electronic lab notebooks is encouraged as it allows proper documentation, traceability and sharing of information between researchers [8]. Research infrastructure can be instrumental in helping scientists as well as the scientific community by providing structured environments.…”