Laboratory Research Notebooks OLIVER GRUMMITT Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio
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LTHOUGH all undergraduate chemistry courses whch laboratory work require that labora. Include . tory notes be kept, the prescribed form of these notes, while providing valuable practice, is not usually flexible enough for the purpose of making notes on laboratory research work. It has been found desirable to provide both new graduate students and new research chemists with some preliminary instruction on this point. The following notes have served this purpose, and they may be of use to other students and instructors, too. This memorandum is written to describe briefly what is considered to be good practice in the keeping of notes on laboratory research. Too often the tendency to regard a research notebook as a bound form of scratch paper leads to a careless, incomplete, and generally unsatisfactory record of the experimental work. If the record of past work is poor, i t is difficult or impossible to evaluate its results in a report or thesis and to plan future experimental work. To depend on one's memory for the missing details of even recent experiments is certain to lead to many errors. Furthermore, there are frequent occasions when another person must consult the notebook or repeat experiments described therein-an important point to keep in mind when writing the notes. It is unquestionably an indispensable part of doing good research to keep a carefully written account of the work. Purpose. The primary purpose of laboratory research notes is to provide a neat, legible, and complete record of all experimental work done. These notes are the raw material from which the results and conclusions are made in a subsequent report or thesis. This record is primarily useful to the investigator, but i t also may be consulted by other people connected with the research problem, and occasionally in industrial research i t may serve as a source of evidence in the prosecution of a patent application or in patent litigation. Notebooks. Research notebooks should be a bound type rather than loose leaf, with numbered pages which may be lined or plain and suitable for writing with ink. The quality of the binding and paper should be good since the notebook must stand a great deal of handling. The record of experimental work is so important and so difficultto replace if lost that it is sometimes suggested that a notebook be used which allows a carbon copy to be made on a page that is removable. If the copies are filed, there are then two complete sets of the notes in case one is lost. This has the disadvantage of requiring the first copy to be written in pencil. While the idea of a duplicate copy is a good one, i t is seldom used in industrial laboratories, possibly because the loss of a notebook either through carelessness or an accident is very rare.
It should be unnecessary to point out that notes on loose pieces of paper must not be made under any circumstances. If the research involves considerable analytical work, it is often convenient to use a separate bound notebook for recording weights, titrations, and calculations. Then only the result of the analysis need be placed in the regular notebook, along with the reference to the page number of the analytical notebook; for example, "This sample had a saponification number of 212 (cf. page 23 of anal. notebook)." This condenses and simplifies the regular notes without discarding any data on scrap paper. In connection with most laboratory research work i t is frequently necessary to consult the literature. Careful notes on the literature reading should of course be made, preferably in a separate notebook. Whenever the laboratory work is related to a journal article or a patent, reference to this can be made in the regular notes by giving the author, journal reference, etc., as well as the page number of the notebook used for literature reading. This will be useful in writing the report or thesis. General Form of the Notes. At the start of the day's work the page should be headed a t the left with Subect, Date, and Reported in a vertical column: Subject: Date: Reported:
This heading may be a t the top or a t any other part of the page so as to follow the previous notes without leaving any lines blank. In case the notebook is used as evidence, this procedure obviates the suspicion that additional notes had been inserted a t some later date. After Subject should be given a brief descriptive title of the work being done. This title should be specific rather than general so as to facilitate finding any particular experiment. If a series of experiments is being run, the title may contain an experiment number: "Catalytic Oxidation of Methane, Exp. 21." The Date should be complete--month, day, and year. Eventually the laboratory research will be described in a progress report, final report, or thesis. When this has been done, the title and date of the report should be written in after Reported. This will assist in locating the correspondinglaboratory research notes from a reading of the report and will also serve as a check on the inclusion of all of the experimental work in a report. After Reported the notes proper are written. At the end of the day's work the investigator should sign his name a t the left immediately after the last line, and a second person in the laboratory should read over the notes and sign in the same place as a witness. This wit-
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ness should be a person capable of understanding the work, and he should write: "Read and understood," then his name and the date. Contents of the Notes. The contents of the notes proper are difficult to describe in detail, because they vary so widely with the nature of the work. In general, every effort should be made to avoid the omission of any relevant data or observation. Therefore, the apparatus and procedure should be carefully and completely described, so that i t would be possible for anyone with training and experience equivalent to the investigator's to repeat this work with the notes alone as a guide. If the apparatus and equipment used are not well known by name, a sketch with all the critical dimensions shown should be made in the notebook. In the procedure should be included all temperatures and pressures, source, preparation, and purification of materials, weights of materials, and in the case of syntheses, the reactants calculated as moles. Molecular weights, boiling points, melting points and the like, which have been obtained from the literature should be written down so they need not be looked up again. If the apparatus or procedure is taken from the literature, a journal or patent reference should be made in the notes. When the same apparatus and procedure are used in a number of experiments, i t need not of course be described repeatedly if the original notes are referred to. The results of many types of experiments are best recorded in the form of a table directly in the notes; for example, in a fractional distillation the following table might be used: Fraction
Tenzperature
Weight of Fraction
n?
d:'
The results of some experiments involve calculations; the steps of these calculations should be indicated,
although the actual arithmetic need not be included. The results of several related experiments can always be better compared and evaluated if they are set up in a table or graph. Such tables or graphs should be made directly in the notebook. Often a study of these summarized results aids in the most intelligent planning of future experiments and in the writing of subsequent reports.' Many experiments yield products of some sort which are to be saved for future work. These samples ought to be labeled according to the experiment numbers used in the notes along with the page number of the notebook. For example, Ether Resin, Exp. 20,page 50 October 11, 1943 J. C.Baker
Indexing the Notebook. The last few pages of a notebook ought to be reserved for the compilation of an index of the contents. Usually the title of the report can serve as a main heading. This index is especially useful when the notebook has been used for more than one research problem for which the notes have not been kept consecutively. Notes as Legal E d e n c e . In industrial research more or less elaborate precautions are taken to make the laboratory notes as legally sound as possible In some cases the notes of a day's work may even be notarized. Although this is a debatable.question for lawyers rather than chemists, i t is thought that the general practice of using bound notebooks with numbered pages, leaving no unused parts on the page, and signing and witnessing the day's notes is probably adequate for most situations.
