Comments for everyone on lab notebook organization:

1) Strive to build a notebook format that is comparable to your lab report in organization and detail.

The Objectives and Conclusions are just a couple of sentences long and are often linked so that you can most easily write the objective at the end of an experiment when you know what kinds of conclusions can be drawn. It’s a good idea to leave some space at the beginning of a new lab unit. Try to put down the basic title and then skip several lines. Then, at the end of the unit, put some concluding statements down and also return to the beginning and fill in the objectives. They usually provide kind of conceptual “book-ends” for an experiment / lab unit and also a kind of visual /organizational tool. Therefore, make sure you write “OBJECTIVES” and “CONCLUSIONS” in bold letters so you can spot the start and end. Some scientists even write stuff like “Conclusions for Sea Urchin Fertilization Lab Unit” to help mark the organization. Some scientists use a different colored pen for these parts but only super-weirdos would have multiple colored pens available all the time they are working in lab so it isn’t very realistic for most people.

2) Use big marks like a big star or asterisk to identify important notes so you don’t miss them when you look back at your notes

3) Avoid isolated phrases or terms. When you look back later these will just get in your way and frustrate you. Write things down but leave some space so you can add definitions to new terms. Then while we are doing our experiments, review your notes for the day periodically and add to them. Complete sentence fragments. If there isn’t space, cross it off and write it in a new place. Sometimes it is hard to ask a question when you first hear about something. But if you get down a few words and write a “?” that will remind you to ask about it when you are reviewing your notes during the experiment. Plan to do this so that at the end of the day your notes are completed for that day and you wouldn’t have to go back and add to them.

4) Drawings can be very helpful, especially labeled drawings, even if you’re not a superstar artist. Figures and drawings should always have titles that explain them (e.g., developing adult eye of Manduca) so you will be reminded what they represent.

5) You should number each page in the notebook sequentially as you add them. If you want to insert pages into earlier parts of the notebook, you can number them too. For example, if you wanted to insert three pages between pages 22 and 23, you could label them, “22A, 22B, and 22C”.

6) Create a Table of Contents and add to it as you go along. Then you can have topics listed and if you have numbered the pages of the notebook you can add the pages to each topic. This allows you to have one topic scattered in your notebook over several weeks but still pull it all together in the Table of Contents. That is very helpful if you need to look back at your notebook after a couple of years.

7) You could add indexing tabs made of pieces of tape if you want to help easily identify specific sections of the notebook.

8) Your notebook should include all the handouts for the class (e.g., syllabus) and any printouts you make etc.. Don’t leave handouts etc. slipped in the pouch of the front cover because then they are disconnected from your notebook pages and basically lost. Instead, use a hole punch and add them to appropriate spot in your notebook. There is a big, three-hole punch in my lab you can use anytime.

9) Use a piece of tape and sharpie to add a label to the outside edge of the notebook so you could read it when it is standing on a bookshelf. You can also find tape in my lab.

10) I think there are two basic organizing strategies for a lab notebook:

a) Some scientists add pages sequentially and add pages as they go along even if experiments get scattered as a result. For example, maybe you don’t get around to looking the microscope slides from an experiment for a couple of weeks.

b) Some scientists try to organization notebooks into sections of specific topics. The latter is a very nice idea and natural but kind of tricky to accomplish because you can forget how things are organized. Sequential adding of pages is the safest,simplest organization but means you need to keep track of where things are with a Table of Contents and/or leave space at the end of an experiment to make notes of dates in your notebook on which you have further analyzed the data from an experiment. An example to think about that is very common is how you will deal with it if we eventually take our Vibratome sections down to view them with the confocal? Will you put that in at the new date or try to tuck it back into where the slides were created? That is a very common problem. Sometimes the data of an experiment are analyzed further on multiple different occasions for different reasons. Sometimes they are analyzed again for a different experiment. Maybe you were initially analyzing the optic lobe neuroblasts but then much later realized that you could go back to those same slides because you have a new notebook that is full of experiments you are now doing on central brain neuroblasts. How will you deal with our Arabidopsis experiment in your notebook? We planted seeds early in the course but won’t deal with them again until they flower.

11) Define abbreviations.

12) ALWAYS provide a figure number and meaningful title for each figure. Do the same for each table. For example: Figure 3: Drawing of Manduca larval brain at the beginning of metamorphosis showing the distribution of mitotic cells. Sometimes you will want to include a figure legend below the figure that explains using full sentences the key features of what is shown. IN ADDITION, describe the figure in the body of the description of your results and refer to each figure sequentially as they come up in the the Results Section. For example, “We found that low levels of proliferation were present in the larval brain prior to start of metamorphosis (Fig. 2). Just two days after this stage, high levels of proliferation were detected in the brain (Fig. 3).”

13) General issues that could be addressed in the Discussion Section of any lab notebook include:

A) Suggest explanations for why things happened the way they did. That includes suggestions for things that didn’t seem to work or that you had trouble with. Sometimes that includes variation within your own samples and in a classroom lab it could include describing and suggesting explanations for variation between your results/observations and those of other students. One thing that we would include here is the finding that the phalloidin-stained muscle cells glowed green so intensely that there was some bleed-through into the red channel making it difficult to see individual nuclei in regions of the embryo that had lots of muscle tissue.

B) Suggest improvements in the methods if the experiment were to be repeated. If you can’t think of any improvements, you can comment on what makes the methods that were used so effective.

C) Discuss how generalizable you think the results are. For example, in our experiments on insect larvae, would it be true for other tissues in the insect? Would it be true for all insects? Would it be true for all animals?

D) Discuss the limitations (strengths and weaknesses) of the experimental methods used. This may help in thinking about how the experiments could be improved when repeated. You can discuss the overall procedures and also specific, detailed steps. For example, in the first week we had trouble with the positioning of the razor blade relative to the sample. But later we found how to adjust the blade position. That can fit into your report in several different sections (Methods (“note: . . .”, Results, Discussion). For the Discussion, you might say, “As noted earlier in the Methods and Results Sections, we initially didn’t appreciate that the horizontal positioning of the blade path could be adjusted on the Vibratome. Having an adjustable blade allows for customizing the blade for a wide range of specimens. It is somewhat surprising we didn’t consider that when we had problems, but in sharing a single machine we didn’t really have the opportunity to get comfortable with each of its controls.” Like that.

E) What happens next? Can you think of further experiments that would be interesting to do now? This is something scientists love to discuss.

F) a) Can you connect the background, methods, of your findings to something you learned in other classes?

b) Did you learn something either in the background information or actual experiment that you think is interesting? You can state that in the Discussion Section and then say why. This is especially nice if you can connect it to biology rather than just saying that you thought it was fun.

G) There are more possibilities.