Specific instructions for your lab book
- Don’t attach the scripts (Usually, you might add these into your personal lab books but for this course, please avoid)
- Attach any results if you require them to answer the questions
- Please copy the question into your book and answer it
- Make sure you answer all the questions
- Keep the lab book as concise as possible and in a single document
- Write in whatever note-taking software you want but please submit as a single PDF
Start your lab book today and send a copy of it to your instructor on the last day.
Some suggestions on writing a good lab book:
- Document your work and tasks everyday
- You might want to add notes about discussions, important things to note and comments.
- 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
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