Laboratory notebook

A laboratory notebook is a contemporaneous, permanent primary record of the owner’s laboratory work. In real-world corporate and industrial chemistry labs, the lab notebook is often a critically important document for both scientific and legal reasons. The outcome of zillion-dollar patent lawsuits often hinges on the quality, completeness, and credibility of a lab notebook. Many corporations have detailed procedures that must be followed in maintaining and archiving lab notebooks, and some go so far as to have the individual pages of researcher’s lab notebooks notarized and imaged on a daily or weekly basis.

If you’re just starting to learn about chemistry lab work, keeping a detailed lab notebook may seem to be overskill, but it’s not. If you plan to take the Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry exam, you should keep a lab notebook. Even if you score a 5 on the AP Chemistry exam, many college and university chemistry departments will not offer you advanced placement unless you can show them a lab notebook that meets their standards.

Laboratory notebook guidelines
Use the following guidelines to maintain your laboratory notebook

• The notebook must be permanently bound. Looseleaf pages are unacceptable. Never tear a page out of the notebook.
• Use permanent ink. Pencil or erasable ink is unacceptable. Erasures are anathema.
• Before you use it, print your name and other contact information on the front of the notebook, as well as the volume number (if applicable) and the date you started using the notebook.
• Number every page, odd and even, at the top outer corner, before you begin using the notebook.
• Reserve the first few pages for a table of contents.
• Begin a new page for each experiment.
• Use only the righthand pages, for recording information. The lefthand pages can be used for scratch paper. (If you are lefthanded, you may use the lefthand pages for recording information but maintain consistency throughout.)
• Record all observations as you make them. Do not trust your memory, even for a minute.
• Print all information legibly, preferably in block letters. Do not write longhand.
• If you make a mistake, draw one line through the errorneous information, leaving it readable. If it is not otherwise obvious, include a short note explaining the reason for the strikethrough. Date and initial the strikethrough.
• Do not leave gaps or whitespaces in the notebook. Gross out whitespaces if leaving an open place in the notebook is unavoidable. That way, no one can go back in and fill in something that didn’t happen. When you complete an experiment, cross out the whitespace that remains at the bottom of the final page.
• Incorporate computer-generated graphs, charts, printouts, photographs, and similar items by taping or pasting them into the notebook. Date and initial are add-ins.
• Include only procedures that you personally perform and date that you personally observe. If you are working with a lab partner and taking shared responsibility for performing procedures and observing data, note that fact as well as describing who did what and when.
• Remember that the ultimate goal of a laboratory notebook is to provide a permanent record of all the information necessary for someone else to reproduce your experiment and replicate your results. Leave nothing out. Even the smallest, apparently trivial, detail may make the difference.