SOS Writing Undergraduate lab books – who cares?

Undergraduate lab books – who cares?

Contrary to popular belief, not every lab has blue up-lighting for maximum drama, people wearing shades indoors, or machines that give conveniently fast results.
stock image: Polina Tankilevitch/Pexels

Labs are an integral part of any science degree. In the UK, most national governing bodies who provide accreditation for various degree streams require Universities to provide some element of lab-based or other practical training to students each year. Labs, especially early in your degree program, provide exposure to a carefully controlled, simulated laboratory environment that teaches you a whole host of methodical skills you might not otherwise have a chance to develop. They give you insight into some real applications of the theory you’ve been learning, and they give you a welcome break from sitting around taking notes in lectures!

It’s likely that before you’re even allowed to set foot into the lab, you’ll be asked to pick up some lab books (usually at least two). Although it may not seem like it at the start of your first lab session, it is the single greatest lab tool you have at your disposal. You’ll learn to love it. Learning to get the most from it is a real skill that takes time and practice. It can help keep you organised, gives you a place to keep notes, and helps you remember all the things you don’t realise you’ve forgotten. Once you’ve felt the benefits of keeping one, you won’t want to be without it!

The structure of experiments

The typical lab experiment can be broken down into three main phases, and these are the same regardless of your degree stream.

Pre-lab
During the lab
Writing up after the lab

The amount of time spent on each varies between institutions. You may have a 10-hour experiment split up over the course of 5 weeks, or two different experiments running concurrently. You will usually use one lab book for each different experiment. Try to think back 5 weeks, and remember what you had for dinner exactly 5 weeks ago. Can’t remember at all? Most people can’t without help (unless they eat the same meal every day).

Even if you can remember the meal you had, what recipe did you use (your method)? Who ate with you and how much did they eat (your collaborators/lab partners, how much did they do)? What equipment did you use to cook with? In the sciences, it’s not enough to report that you had dinner 5 weeks ago, you have to provide a lot more information than you might be accustomed to giving, and the best way to make sure you don’t forget any of it is to write it down as you go. Future You will thank you later!

Lab books: the basics

You’ll be given guidance by your lab organiser about the type of book you should get, but it is normal to use hard-cover books, with single-rule A4 paper. If in doubt, follow the rules you are given by your institution and always, always ask if you’re not sure. The cover is the most important aspect, since even a physics lab might involve experiments with fluids and you don’t want your results to be destroyed in an unfortunate “incident”. You want your lab book to be as durable as possible since it will take a beating throughout the course of a year’s lab sessions (as well as travel to and from home).

If you have a laptop, it can initially be hard to see the value of keeping a physical lab book, so you may well be asking “what’s the point?”. Apart from the fact that real lab researchers use them, so you’re getting real experience of how research is done, these are some of the most important reasons why they’re used:

You need to have some physical record of your results that clearly shows when and where things went wrong (100% guarantee they will).
Results in a lab book can’t be tampered with.
It stands as proof that the work you have done was done by you.
A book can’t crash and lose you six hours of work because you forgot to save it.
It will act as your memory of the session, to help you write up your lab report.
Diagrams are far easier to draw by hand.
It’s easier to write notes than type them because you won’t get distracted by formatting.
You can’t get distracted by social media if you don’t have a laptop open.
You can always print out graphs and attach them to your book if you need to.
It helps the person marking your report to see that you understood what you were doing during the session.

If you prefer to keep your notes digitally, you can always photograph/scan and organise your notes at the end of each session (there are some recent software options that will help with this), or type up your notes. I recommend the typing-up route, personally, since you’re going to have to write your lab report at some point. Getting into the habit of typing your notes up at the end of a session is a massive time-saver. If you arrange your notes more-or-less into sections that will become your lab report while everything is fresh in your mind, you don’t have to pull an all-nighter to get it done a few hours before the deadline.

Pre-lab organisation

Before your lab sessions begin, you will be given instructions by your lab organiser about what experiment you’re doing, lab safety rules, and how to use the equipment (these are known collectively as the experiment “protocols”). Make sure you take the time to go through whatever documents you are given carefully. Before the first session on the experiment, write (in your own words) the following in your lab book:

The title and aim of the experiment.
A diagram of the overall experimental setup. Annotate with labels, but leave enough space for notes that you can write after you actually see and interact with the equipment.
Experimental protocol and safety considerations.
Key formulae and other theory you might need to make reference to.

By writing out what you understand of the experimental set up and protocols beforehand, you will know what you’re doing and be able to get straight down to work as soon as you get to the lab. Crucially, it will also give you an idea of what you don’t understand, and therefore what questions you might want to ask of the person overseeing your experiment (usually a Ph.D. student – I’ll refer to these as “lab helpers” from here onwards). It shows that you’re able to plan what you are going to do, and you can use your time more effectively as a result. Before every session (including the first one), you should also use your lab book to note:

Who your lab partner is.
The date of the session.
Details of what readings you expect to take during the session.
Mark out your tables, give them descriptive titles, and pre-populate the headings to save time. Use a ruler!
Calculate your theoretical/expected values and put these in your table already.

Keeping a good lab book is more about planning ahead and being organised than having neat handwriting. It takes effort, but it does get easier over time as you learn what information is critical to include. Usually, a single frantic 3-am-the-morning-it’s-due writing up session is all it takes to learn what things you should have written down when you realise in a sudden panic what you can’t remember. I don’t recommend those, though. Not fun at all.

It’s a good idea to leave plenty of space between your tables, so you have enough room to take detailed notes describing what you’re doing during the session, who did what, and what went wrong. Things frequently don’t go to plan, and if you don’t pre-calculate your expected values you may not realise things have gone wrong until it’s too late. Then you have to do everything again from scratch. Mark the table columns out with pencil and ruler so that the data you take won’t get muddled. If you want to, you can also create a plot of your theoretical values and attach it to your lab book. That way, you’ll be able to “plot” your real data as they come in and see immediately if your values look wildly incorrect.

During the labs

Your lab helpers are there to help you, so don’t be afraid to turn to them if there are things you don’t understand
Stock image: ThisIsEngineering/pexels.com

Thinking ahead about the experiment (and the theory behind it) allows you to think of questions you might want to ask of your lab organiser/lab helper. If you leave this step until you come to write up, you will have missed a massive opportunity to ask for advice from the people who are going to be marking your reports! For this reason, start writing up your lab report as soon as possible after each session while everything is fresh in your mind. This gives you the best chance to figure out what you aren’t sure about, and to get feedback on your formatting or what you’ve missed. Ph.D. students in particular are an amazing resource at your disposal, and they want to help you – but you have to be proactive and willing to ask.

What should I write, though?

There’s often a lot of confusion from students about what they should write down in addition to their data tables, and to this I give the somewhat woolly answer of “everything”. It’s definitely better to write too much in your lab book than too little. Essentially you need to write down anything that you might find useful when you’re coming to write up (something which is difficult to judge before you’ve written up). Every time you complete a step, describe (in your own words) what you’ve just done. If your lab partner performed the step, write down that they did it. When you come to write your report you have to make completely clear what you did and what was done by your partner. While you’re actually performing the step, try to think about whether there are any sources of error, and what kind of errors they are. For example, if you’re measuring something using some sort of ruler, what’s the precision of the ruler you’re using? You need to note this sort of thing down. If anything goes wrong, or is different from what you thought would happen (based on your instructions), write down how it was different, and also, what you did about it. Sometimes, things might happen that influence (bias) your results but don’t require you to re-take them – for example, if every measurement you get is the same fraction below the theoretical results. You will need to be able to identify and talk about sources of these influences in your report.

If you’re calculating your errors as you go (which is a good habit to get into), make sure you put the full calculation. If you skip steps because you think they’re obvious, you may not remember later on how you did the calculation. If you had to do a derivation to get there, show the full derivation. It’s a tedious thing to do at the time, but part of your training as a scientist is to do things carefully, correctly, and methodically. It also make your life considerably easier when you come to write up. It’s so very, very hard to figure out where a calculation went wrong if you miss out “obvious” steps, and when you’re writing up you really don’t want to have to do the whole calculation again from scratch just to find your mistake.

Oops, I messed it up

If something goes wrong, and you notice that your data is waaaay off where you expected it to be based on your theoretical values (which you’ve definitely calculated), or for example if you accidentally put decimal places in the wrong location because you’re converting data from cm to mm (I don’t recommend doing that, just record it raw if you can), don’t be tempted to scribble things out. Apart from looking untidy, it can also appear to the reader like you’re trying to “fudge” or misrepresent inconvenient data, and science always has to be transparent. So, if you make a series of mistakes and need to make a new table, cleanly cross through the previous table and put a detailed note explaining why, and where to find the replacement. If you write a single value down incorrectly, put a single line through it and write the corrected value next to it, again with a note explaining why you’re doing that. Make it clear for your marker that you’re not trying to hide inconvenient data.

I want to stick something in my book

There are occasions where you may need to include print-outs (for graphs, electronically generated data, or some other information) in your lab book. If you know ahead of time, you can leave pages, or spaces on pages free. The main thing is to not cover up any of your data or writings, so if you have an A4 printout, attach it to the first available empty A4 page in your book. These printouts will form part of your work, so you have to make sure they’re securely attached to the page i.e., if you’re stapling it, staple all four corners, if you’re gluing, apply glue to the whole insert. The main thing is to be sure that these things can’t fall out, become detached, or flap around from only being stapled at one corner, for example.

Remember…

Above all, the lab book is a communication tool. A good one will let someone fully recreate your experiment – even years later – and get the same set of results, using only what you wrote down. Try to keep this in mind when you’re in the labs; the actual results you get are a secondary concern. The most important thing is that you provide evidence to the marker that you knew what you were doing, that you know what the results mean, and that if things went wrong, you have an idea of why and what you could do better.

How to write a great lab report or go back to Guides