Billet : Can an Electronic Lab Notebook Help Researchers Do Better Science?

Scientists, engineers, and technicians use lab notebooks to document their laboratory research. For various reasons, researchers have tended to prioritize print notebooks over electronic ones, but electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) have some advantages: they can more readily be used as evidence in patent prosecution and intellectual property litigation, and through the searchability and standardization that arises from the assignment of metadata, tags, and persistent identifiers, they are central to research data management strategies.