The Laboratory Notebook

General Chemistry students, please print this document with 1-inch-wide margins. Trim off the margins to make the document pages smaller than your laboratory notebook pages, then tape the document to the first few pages of your lab notebook.

The laboratory notebook is a record of your laboratory work. In most cases, it is the ONLY record of the work that you as an individual have done. If you are the only individual doing the work, then the notebook is the only record of the work that exists! It is an irreplaceable and extremely valuable document. As such, the laboratory notebook must be organized, complete, and useful. It will automatically meet these criteria if it is faithfully maintained according to agreed-upon format guidelines. The guidelines that we provide here are consistent with those used in academic, industrial, business, and goverment laboratory settings. Our expectation is that you will study and follow these guidelines conscientiously.

It is important for you to realize that laboratory record keeping is a learned skill, not a talent. A person acquires a skill only through continued, disciplined practice of an activity. By the time you graduate from WPI, you must have acquired professional level skills in laboratory record keeping. One of our responsibilities in the general chemistry program is to initiate the process by which you acquire these skills.

Guidelines for Obtaining and Maintaining a Lab Notebook

You should purchase a laboratory notebook that meets the following specifications:
1. It should be approximately 8.5 x 11 inches in dimension.
2. It should contain 100-150 ruled pages. Ruling may be either square grid (preferred) or horizontal.
3. It must be constructed of high-quality, nonacidic paper.
4. It must be bound at the left margin. It is not acceptable to use a looseleaf or spiral notebook for maintenance of laboratory records, because pages can be intentionally inserted or removed, or accidentally ripped out. Any such action opens the possibility that someone will question the authenticity of your data.
5. Notebook pages should be serially numbered at the factory, in the upper outside corner.
All writing in the notebook must be done in permanent ink. A ball point pen with black ink is recommended. Please do NOT use pencil or water soluble ink. Pencil entries may be erased and altered, and tend to smear over time. Entries in water soluble ink may be completely blurred if water is spilled on the notebook.
The key to writing a useful notebook is simple clarity: clear layout, clear descriptions, and good penmanship. All writing in the notebook should be grammatically sound, legible, and reasonably neat.
If you make an error in writing a word, recording data, or doing a calculation, cross out the error with a single line, then write the correct word or number immediately above the incorrect entry. It is important for someone reading the notebook to be able to assess the nature of the error. Under no circumstances is it permissible to use white-out in a lab notebook, to completely obscure or erase an error, or to rip pages out of the notebook.
It is essential to keep complete records of ALL experiments, whether "successful" or "unsuccessful". It is amazing how often it happens that an experiment initially judged "unsuccessful" later proves to have been "successful" in an unanticipated way.
Recommended format for the laboratory notebook. The notebook contents are generally divided into 2 parts, called the "front matter" and the "body".
1. Front Matter
  1. Write your name, address, email address, and phone number on the front cover of the notebook, and again on the inside of the front cover. If you anticipate needing more than one notebook, give the notebook a number. For example, John B. Doe's first notebook might be numbered JBD-1. This number should be written on the notebook cover.
  2. Affix this document in the first few pages of your notebook. Leave 2 blank pages following this document for a Table of Contents. Keep the Table of Contents up-to-date.
  3. Following the Table of Contents pages, leave a blank page for a Table of Abbreviations. As you work with your notebook, you may find it convenient to abbreviate frequently-used words, formulas, instruments, and so on. Every time you create such an abbreviation, enter it in the Table of Abbreviations in the front. This will help someone examining your notebook to decipher these abbreviations.
2. Body
  1. Begin the record for each new experiment on a right-hand (odd-numbered) page.
  2. Prior to writing any notebook entries on a particular day, the day and date, including the year, should be unambiguously recorded. For example, it is unambiguous to write "Wednesday, January 3, 2---". It is ambiguous to write "Wednesday, 1/3/2---, because in some cultures, the first number signifies the month, while in others the second number signifies the month!
  3. Each new experiment description should begin with the title of the experiment, a statement of the objective of the experiment, relevant chemical equations, and a list of required materials. Each entry or section should be prefaced by a descriptive heading. For example
    
    Title: Revised Synthesis of Cobalt Chloride.
    Objective: To attempt a new synthesis of cobalt chloride based on a modification of an established procedure.
    Chemical Equations:
    CoCO₃(s) + HCl(aq) --> CoCl₂(aq) + H₂O + CO₂
    Required Materials:
    CoCO₃(s)
    HCl (12 M aqueous)
    Erlenmeyer flasks
    Magnetic stirrer/hot plate
    Magnetic stir bar
    Equipment for suction filtration
    Drying oven
    This information can be written in the notebook prior to coming to lab.
  4. As you carry out the experiment, write down your experimental procedure as a series of numbered steps. Note that it is very important to do this as you carry out the procedure, rather than after you leave the lab. It is not acceptable to write on loose pieces of paper during laboratory, then later transcribe the information into your lab notebook. The notebook must accompany you to the lab, and must be open and in constant use as you work.
    Occasional spills that victimize the notebook are inevitable. It is therefore pretty easy to tell whether or not someone is using the notebook properly in the laboratory. Using the notebook properly AND AT THE SAME TIME keeping it perfectly spotless and neat are almost mutually exclusive.
  5. Following each step, write down observations made as a result of performing the step. As you carry out and record an experimental procedure, it is important to write down ALL data and observations IMMEDIATELY. IMMEDIATE recording of numbers and observations is important because numbers can be easily transposed mentally if there is a delay in writing them, and interesting and perhaps crucial observations can be forgotten. WRITE DOWN WHATEVER HAPPENS WHEN IT HAPPENS. Remember that no experimental detail or observation is too insignificant to be omitted from your notebook. For example, the following types of things can be very important:
    - Record all information necessary to identify chemical reagents and other supplies.
    - Note whether water was distilled or deionized, and whether you did anything to test its condition.
    - Use proper names for labware and vessels. Was a sample weighed on weighing paper, or directly into a container? Did you carry out the reaction in a beaker or flask? If so, what size beaker? What kind and size of flask?
    - Indicate what containers/vessels are made of (metal, glass, plastic).
    - Indicate what procedures were used to clean containers/vessels/equipment.
    - In carrying out a reaction, in what sequence were reactants mixed? How were reagents measured?
    - How was heating carried out (hot water bath, steam bath, hot plate, burner?); how was stirring carried out (magnetically, by hand, continuously, intermittently?).
    - If you are recording a color, what type of light are you observing it under (fluorescent, tungsten, sunlite)?
    - How long was a reaction continued? At what point during the reaction did precipitate appear? Did the precipitate change in appearance after it formed? Over how long a time?
    - Did you interrupt the experiment at any point? For how long?
    Proper recording of procedure, data, and observations can be invaluable if at some later time you need to repeat the experiment based on your notebook writeup, or if you need to prove that you did such-and-so and observed this-and-that on or before a specific date. As an example, the procedure writeup for a simple experiment is given below:
    
    Procedure followed:
    
    1) I weighed a pre-1981 copper penny. Mass penny = 3.0523 g.
    2) I placed the penny in a 100-mL beaker and added 10 mL of concentrated nitric acid (HNO₃). The copper immediately began to react with the acid. Reaction occurred with vigorous bubbling, producing a blue solution, a red-brown gas, and noticeable heat. The penny got shiny and seemed to get smaller as the solution became darker blue.
    3) I transferred the blue solution to a second beaker, leaving the penny in the original beaker.
    4) I added 5 mL of distilled water to the beaker containing the penny. Reaction stopped at this point. The distilled water had a slight blue tint.
    5) I poured the distilled water wash into the original blue solution.
    6) I dried the penny with a Kimwipe and placed it on a paper towel to dry thoroughly. The penny was very shiny at this point.
    7) After about 1 hour, I reweighed the penny. Mass = 2.6954 g.
  6. In writing a stepwise description of procedure, please use past-tense. You may use either first person or third person in stating what you did. For example,
    First person: I filtered the mixture to isolate the blue solid.
    Third person: The mixture was filtered to isolate the blue solid.
    
    Some people prefer the first person because it makes it very clear who did the work! In industrial laboratories, first person is mandatory.
  7. Your writeup should contain drawings of any special equipment setups or procedures used.
  8. After you have completed carrying out and recording the experimental procedure, perform data analysis and calculations in the notebook. This is where you interpret your data: figure out what it is saying to you and how that relates to the original question or objective of the experiment. This is where you would put charts or graphs, and where you might speculate in writing about possible interpretations of the data. This is where you "think in the notebook."
  9. Finish the experimental writeup by presenting a brief description of conclusions that you can draw from your work.
If you have an interesting idea about an experiment you've already done or about an experiment that you could do, write it down in the notebook immediately, after entering the date.
If someone shows you how to operate an instrument or carry out a procedure that is new to you, take notes in your notebook. You can use these notes when you later go back to do the procedure on your own.
Your primary guiding principle in the laboratory should be to maintain your notebook so carefully and completely that, at some later time, you or any other scientist could repeat any experiment or operation using only your lab notebook as a resource.

A Fictional but Possible Scenario

In a few short years, you will be a professional. Some of you will be professional engineers, others professional scientists (biologists, biochemists, or chemists). It will be assumed by prospective employers that as a professional, you are knowledgeable about all aspects of professionalism. One aspect, of course, is record-keeping. Suppose that you depart WPI as a professional biologist, and are hired by a genetic engineering firm, GenDesign, as a research scientist. You are assigned to an ongoing project, the goal of which is to develop a process for cloning dinosaurs from DNA extracted from insects trapped in ancient tree sap (amber). It's a hot field, so a number of competing firms are engaged in similar projects to achieve dinosaur cloning. There is big money and nobel-prize-level prestige at stake. On December 3, 2---, you make a breakthrough and successfully generate an apatosaurus embryo. As a WPI undergraduate, you have been well-trained in laboratory record-keeping procedures, so you have carefully maintained your lab notebook according to the general professional guidelines that you learned in school. Also, you have followed additional guidelines specified by your employer that require your notebook entries to be dated and witnessed by a colleague each day. Unbeknownst to you, on the very same day Freddie Dolt, a research scientist at a competing firm (DesignerGenes) accomplishes the same feat. S/he obtained a degree in biology from Acme University, which does not require that laboratory notebooks be maintained in undergraduate laboratory courses. Instead, Acme students fill out data sheet forms and turn them in to be graded. So Freddie doesn't know much about maintaining laboratory records. As it happens, on December 3 Freddie had left the notebook at home, so recorded all of his/her work for that day on a piece of brown paper towel. Freddie was a bit embarrassed about the paper towel, so did not ask a lab partner to date and witness it. Instead, Freddie spent the evening at home copying all the info from the paper towel into his/her notebook, cleverly writing it all under a December 4 heading. The next day, Freddie simply added the work s/he actually did under the same December 4 heading, and asked a colleague to date and witness the notebook.

A few months later, patent applications for the process from both GenDesign and DesignerGenes are received in the U.S. Patent Office, and a dispute is under way. Both companies claim to have discovered the process at about the same time. The only way to resolve the matter is to go to court. Attorneys for GenDesign ascertain the identity of the discovering scientist (you), and request you to testify in court as to the time and nature of the discovery. You are asked, of course, to bring your laboratory record. Similarly, DesignerGenes attorneys subpoena Freddie Dolt and her/his notebook. Because you have faithfully followed procedural guidelines in maintaining your records, you are able to weather the brutal cross examination by DesignerGenes attorneys, who are unable to discredit either the results or the date of your work. Freddie is not so fortunate. Under withering questioning from the lead attorney for GenDesign, Freddie is beaten to a pulp. Not only does his notebook record indicate that he made the discovery one day later than you did (even though he really made it on the same day!), but the attorney found several completely obscured data entries in the notebook. Even worse, the pages in Freddie's book were not prenumbered at the notebook factory, and the entries in some sections of the book were completely blurred because Freddie had used water-soluble ink. It is clear to the judge that the patent should be awarded to GenDesign. In short order, you receive a promotion to senior research scientist and a 25% raise. Over the next 17 years, GenDesign makes $8 billion from your discovery. 10 years later, you are awarded the Nobel Prize for your work. Poor Freddie is quietly let go, and spends the remainder of his career stumbling from low-paid job to lower-paid job. Having lost out completely in the dinosaur-cloning field, DesignerGenes makes large cuts in its workforce, suffers declining profits, and declares bankruptcy within 5 years.