Long story short – Been at my first lab job for almost 3 years now. The way my boss wants everyone to organize their lab notebooks made me confused at first, as it was different from what I did in college. I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while now.

My understanding of a lab notebook is that it holds all the crucial data, especially raw data, and all your ideas as you conceived them.

So even if you have a vague idea for something, you write it down there, that way it’s in your own handwriting and dated and practically sealed there in the book.

My boss saw that as “ass-backwards.” The only thing he wants to see in lab notebooks is the finished, processed report. In other words, I print out and paste Word docs and Excel spreadsheets of the typed up procedure and data. Hardly anything is handwritten in my lab notebook. Sure the documents have filenames and paths to go back into the server to find them, but ironically I found THIS method to be “ass-backwards.” Of course you should have a finished report at the end of every experiment, but I find it weird that a lab notebook would not have any of the original writing and just the processed reports in it.

Instead, he wants us all to cram our raw data and stuff like that into a binder he dubs a “chartbook.”

I find it irritating every time I show him raw data though and he grumbles at it saying “This is bullshit. It doesn’t tell you anything.” Even though. Well. It does. He just wants to see it in a Word doc/Excel spreadsheet.

Does anyone else organize their data my boss’s way?

Topics: science, work, biology, chemistry, laboratory