The recording and reporting of scientific practices supports the reproducibility and transparency of these practices. As some datasets are now too large to document in paper lab notebooks, electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) can help you achieve good documentation practices. ELNs can improve your data acquisition, archiving, accessibility, sharing and even data presentation during personal and lab meetings.
There are various paid-for and free ELNs available. This guide will focus on adapting Microsoft OneNote (available for all UFS researchers) to use as an ELN, but will also provide a list of online lab notebooks.
OneNote is a general note-taking application and was not designed for scientific purposes. But its hierarchical structure can be adapted to use for an ELN.
Structure and labelling:
Based on OneNote's organisation, a notebook can have unlimited projects (Section Groups in OneNote). A project can contain unlimited sections (e.g., protocols); meanwhile, experiments can be arranged using at least three hierarchical layers: sections, pages, and subpages. An experiment or any other analysis should be structured using five essential parts:
(1) an introduction to the experiment describing, for example, a hypothesis to be tested;
(2) a detailed description of the objective(s) of the experiment;
(3) a materials and methods section providing all materials or reagents along with their references or lot numbers (specific methods or protocols could be hyperlinked to this part [Insert a link feature or Crtl+K in OneNote]);
(4) a results part presenting all main outputs of the experimental approach; and
(5) conclusions discussing the main findings and recommendations for further research.
To facilitate ELN usage, OneNote allows users to create templates that can contain the aforementioned five elements or specific protocols (e.g., PCRs). Once a template has been created, it is simply inserted into the notebook from the menu bar by selecting, Insert > Page Templates and then selecting the created template from the dropdown list. This allows for easy repetition of similar data entry across all data collected.
Customisable tags can also be used to prioritize or organize experiments or any other entry. For instance, a customizable tag can be applied to easily find and recognize key experiments or protocols important for constructing a manuscript.
Here is an example of OneNote's hierarchical structure adapted to an ELN workflow:
OneNote’s searching functionality allows users to quickly retrieve important information through this vast amount of data. Thus, experiments, protocols, or any other entry should be labeled with essential information traceable over time.
Data acquisition:
Over the past years, a tendency to promote reproducibility and transparency practices has been established among the scientific community. In that respect, most scientific journals demand that researchers provide the raw data generated from their experiments. To consolidate this trend, raw data availability should be mandatory in any research facility, regardless of the scientific discipline. OneNote’s data storage feature allows users to optimally collect raw files resulting from any scientific approach. However, storage of large datasets, such as high-quality images or sequencing files, will depend on Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint storage plans. Alternatively, these datasets can be hyperlinked to internal or external hosting platforms. (Read more about our figshare platform for your datasets.) To avoid hosting-related accessibility issues, a representative file or low-quality image can be uploaded to OneNote along with a detailed description of these hyperlinked datasets.
Data presentation
OneNote provides users with several tools to enhance data presentation. These tools are available at the Insert or Draw tabs. For instance, Microsoft Visio (OneNote > Insert > Diagram) is a diagramming application that could be used to sketch a protocol or a bioinformatic pipeline. Audio or video notes from lab meetings or experiments (e.g., mouse experiments) can also be recorded. OneNote’s optical character recognition (OCR) feature can be used to acquire text from old laboratory documents as well. OCR built-in capability converts the text from a picture, a scanned file, or a handwritten document into a machine-encoded, editable text.
OneNote’s compatibility with other Microsoft Office applications, such as PowerPoint or Excel, can give researchers an advantage for figure and table presentation. Graphs and tables constructed in these programs can be easily exported to OneNote.
A major advantage of ELNs over paper laboratory notebooks (PLNs) is their flexibility to record experiments continuously. Data generated from long experiments could be documented on a single page, separating each result by the exact date (OneNote > Insert > Time stamp) on which each part of the experiment was performed. There is no longer any need to create a page for each working day, as it is expected when using a PLN.
Sharing
OneNote allows researchers to share their ELN among their team members and collaborators via a cloud-based platform such as Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint. In this manner, the experimental data are accessible from anywhere at any time, which is essential when an international collaboration has been established. As OneNote is part of the Office 365 suite, it is able to be saved to your University provided OneDrive cloud storage location.
Here is an example of an electronic sharing workflow among institutions, laboratories and members, with access control:
Storage, security and compliance
ELN data storage and security are major concerns among researchers. In this regard, we recommend to establish an on-premise Microsoft SharePoint storage system (such as the UFS's SharePoint and OneNote options available for all researchers) to prevent data security breaches related to cloud computing. We also recommend backing up a full ELN to a OneNote package file (.onepkg); this single file contains the text, embedded files, audio, and video, similar to a .zip file.
Interoperability
Microsoft OneNote is able to interact with several external resources that can be used to improve data accessibility, acquisition, and presentation. Smartphones, tablets, and smart glasses can be used for audio and video recording, as well as for image capturing. The same devices, along with smartwatches, can also be used for data accessibility. For example, protocols can be displayed during experimentation and therefore minimise paper use and printing costs.
This guide is based on the following article:
Guerrero S, López-Cortés A, García-Cárdenas JM, Saa P, Indacochea A, Armendáriz-Castillo I, et al. (2019) A quick guide for using Microsoft OneNote as an electronic laboratory notebook. PLoS Comput Biol 15(5): e1006918. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006918
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.