Viromics2024: Lab Book

References for writing in markdown:

Start your lab book today and send a copy of it to your instructor on the last day.

Some strong suggestions on writing a good lab book:

  • Document your work and tasks everyday

  • Structure it in a chronological order; each section = new day
    • Adding sections for specific tasks like “01_Evaluating sequence quality”
    • Use meaningful and descriptive titles
  • Using a logical order for folder and file names (use structure made by instructors)

  • Include relevant websites, folders where you can find files, tools (names, links, versions)

  • Include citations for all the papers and tools you reference in your lab book

An example can be seen here

Where to write this lab book in markdown?

A plain text editor that is NOT Microsoft Word.

Additional References

The paper “Ten Simple Rules for a Computational Biologist’s Laboratory Notebook”, by Santiago Schnell of 2015 offers interesting insights: Most relevant are rules 4, 6 and 10. Keeping a hard copy of your lab book is not necessary, however make sure you have it backed up.

Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research”, by Geir Sandve and collaborators, 2013