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As someone who works in both wet-lab work and bioinformatics, there is a horrible disconnect between my lab notebook for wet-lab work and my computational work (which mainly consists of jupyter notebooks or dated python scripts).

I've still not seen a product or workflow that can combine the two. Electronic notebooks for bench work really don't work.



I might suggest using git to track your code, then you can write down the first six letters of hashes in the lab notebook for the commits that correspond.


What's wrong with electronic lab notebooks for bench work, and what would you hope to see in a 'notebook' that combines wet work with computational work?


Quite often I want to sketch things, or stick in a paper printout from old-school lab-equipment. Both if these are a pain on a computer.

With a lab book you can take it round with you from lab area to lab area or quickly jot something down. I suppose you could give each researcher a designated "lab-only" laptop, though waiting for software to load up etc just to write down a few numbers is a lot of hassle.


I use a cheap chromebook as a dedicated lab laptop. I set up a digital lab notebook with vimwiki, taskwiki and git, and sync to a git server (and other computers I use). I only have to open it up and vim is ready to jot down things.




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