Keeping a lab notebook

Your lab notebook is arguably the most important part of your research. No matter how cool your results are, if you don't have a good record of how you got them then they don't mean anything.

Lab Notebook organization

We recently (2025) transitioned to using Github as a way to keep lab notebooks. Every lab member has their own repo in the Wallacelab organisation for their lab notebook, named as notebook and then their first and last name (e.g., notebook-barbara-mcclintock). You will be assigned one when you join the lab, and this is the authoritative version of your lab notebook. You can keep other notes and stuff around (highly recommended), but this repo is the ultimate repository of what you have done in the lab.

Please use the following organization for your notebook (based on Scroggie et al. 2023)

• Repo - Although each project should have its own repo (esp. for computational ones), you should have only a single lab notebook repo. The lab notebook is where you keep a narrative description of what you did, along with enough detail for someone else to recreate your work.
• Projects - Within your notebook repo, use Github's Projects tab to organize specific projects you're working on. Projects consist of various Issues (see below) related to an overarching goal. You will probably have only 1-3 Projects active at any given time.
• Issues - Issues are where you keep individual experiments or sets of experiments. Ideally, each Issue should represent a single line of investigation and include all your steps (what you did, why you did it, and enough experimental details to recreate it), along with key figures & graphs showing your results. Each Issue should belong to a Project; you can also use custom tags to further specify them if you want. When you have finished that line of investigation, add a final summary of what you learned and close the Issue.
• Overview - For each project, please include one Overview Issue where you collect the results of your investigations, almost like a table of contents. The idea is that every time you close an Issue, add 1-3 sentences and a key figure or two to the Project Overview issue. There shouldn't be a lot of information here, just enough that someone can scan down it and locate the thing they're looking for quickly.