| lab notebook |
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| Written by Roys | |
| Saturday, 30 September 2006 | |
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Keeping a useful and accurate lab notebook is a difficult but most useful skill to acquire. Evaluating a lab notebook is difficult and time-consuming. So, in order to smoothen the evaluation process, a lab notebook should have certain features like purpose, figures, diary, analysis and summary. The skill of writing the Laboratory Notebook – even the existence of such a Notebook – has probably fallen somewhat into disuse with the advent of the photocopied worksheet. Yet it is a vital part of industrial and academic research, and indeed can in these activities be required in law to establish, for example, patent rights. Anyone should be able to pick up your notebook and understand what you have written. This must be the main thing - you are writing for someone else. If the writing is clear to them, then it certainly will be to you. Achieving this requires some organisation as well as a certain style. Like a diary, a lab notebook should have a meticulous record of the observations made during the experiments, taking note of the figures obtained with careful definition of all quantities. All the data should be properly arranged in tables - if possible - with rows and columns. Records in the lab notebook should be clear and precise. Each laboratory notebook must be written as an individual effort, never as a group project. The times when pressures mount up such as when you are worried about grades, or at the end of the trimester, or in times of illness are the most likely time to be tempted to get unauthorized help on an assignment. Therefore, be especially careful at such times. A schematic diagram in a lab notebook can help illustrate a step-by -step process by focusing on the essential working principles involved. The graphs in a lab notebook help in displaying data in visual format - showing the trends or the comparison between theory and the data obtained through experiments. The figures in the lab notebook should always have proper labels. Lastly, there should be a summary section in the lab notebook, succinctly describing the research and its findings. A well-maintained lab notebook not only helps its owner to conduct the research in an orderly manner, but also becomes a document that other scholars may use as a reference in future. |
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