Your lab is similar to this scenario:
Your laboratory hosts PhD students on a regular or occasional basis. The PhD project is typically part of a bigger picture, bigger research project or initiative. At the same time it is separate enough that it can be managed separately, also due to the nature of PhD projects, as they often include novel, risky research areas that may have unpredictable results. However, this does not mean the PhD project is unstructured. It still has an outline, a structure, a long term plan and set of goals, which in time become more and more concrete. Usually, one PhD student is working on a PhD project, with at least one supervisor.
Size: You are a small/medium sized academic or industrial research lab within the larger organization
Work focus: basic research, applied research, planning, executing experiments, reporting, publishing articles
Keywords describing the example: PhD, doctorate thesis, research, young researcher, menthor, supervisor
Suggested SciNote structure:
Team
In the beginning, a team is defined, consisting of different researchers e.g. investigation of environmental toxins as polycyclic aromatic compounds (PAC analysis). You can create a Project folder (PAC analysis), where all the related project work and experiments will be gathered.
Project
Researchers can create projects, and within those projects, individual experiments are created that consist of multiple tasks. Projects can be private (e.g. your PhD work), or shared if you need to collaborate. Within the PAC analysis team, projects would be e. g. Characterization, LC-MS/MS, MALDI-TOF MS
Experiments
Experiment can be e.g. UV/VIS Spectroscopy, Quantification etc.
Tasks
Each task has its own protocol, which can be self-written or imported from protocols.io – a collection of freely available protocols. For each task, you can set start and due dates, add comments, and assign them as completed. Besides that, you can add the results of a completed protocol directly to the respective task.
“We created a “PAC analysis” team and projects for individual tasks (e. g. Characterization, LC-MS/MS, MALDI-TOF MS). To get to know the system, we decided to make a simple UV/Vis characterization of 16 different standards within two 96-well microtiter plates (MTP). So, we created a protocol within the ELN and linked it to a task in the experiment “UV/Vis spectroscopy” and the project “Characterization.”
To sum it up, your SciNote structure could be
Team 1: PAC Analysis
Project(s): MALDI – TOF MS (Mass Spectrometry)
Experiment(s): Testing matrices, Quantification, UV/Vis spectroscopy
Task(s): Protocol to follow, and results once the work is done
SciNote in practice
Learn from Jacy Jacob how their lab team at University of Richmond uses SciNote for their daily work.
We reccomend you to watch the entire webinar where we cover the implementation of an ELN in an academic lab.
Examples of additional functionalities that are helpful:
Inventories in SciNote are lists (repositories, libraries) of whatever you need e.g., files, samples, equipment, reagents or something completely different. They are completely editable so your columns can contain names, ID codes, barcodes, files, dates and more. You can always add a new item to the inventory and then assign it to the task within the experiment. This means you will always have the full history of what has been done with each inventory item, one click away.
You can search the public database of protocols.io directly from SciNote Protocol repository, preview protocols.io protocols, and if you like a protocol, you can seamlessly import it into SciNote. SciNote will get the protocol from protocols.io, parse it to SciNote protocol format which you will be able to preview and store into your SciNote Protocol repository.
Get an entire overview of SciNote functionalites.
Can’t find what you are looking for?
Schedule a Q&A session with us to discuss the best option for your lab.
SciNote Reviews
Connect with us
SciNote Newsletter
Receive SciNote ELN news, webinars and articles.