(Photo : Screenshot from SciNote Official Website)

Suppose you're working on a major scientific manuscript. Can you find the information you need easily among your paper notes? In this case, an Electronic Lab Notebook (or ELN) is a much easier way to keep track of procedures, findings, notes, and other science data using your devices. Unlike typical paper notebooks, ELN provides improved data and protocol  management practices.

Plus, in many cases, Electronic Lab Notebooks can provide scientific data security, inventory management, team collaboration, and regulatory compliance. These can help organize your research much more easily.

SciNote's digital lab notebook has these features to keep your research tucked in one place.

What Is an Electronic Lab Notebook?

An Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) works like a paper lab notebook in its basic form. But unlike paper notebooks, you can collect and log down documentation about your research through your digital devices wherever you are. In addition, you can easily add many different types of files to your ELN - from Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, to photos of your experimental set-up or graphs from your analysis. No longer will you need to print them out and cut and paste those materials into your paper notebooks.

These days, an ELN is more than a digital copy of your lab notebook. Many products offer functionalities such as inventory management and more to make lab management much more straightforward.

As a digital solution, lab notebook software can centralize critical information about your studies into a single location. From this platform, you can analyze data and share it safely with colleagues. Since it's accessible online, easily looking up data and retrieving information for science reproducibility is a breeze.

Best Electronic Lab Notebook

SciNote provides an Electronic Lab Notebook trusted by the FDA, NIH, USDA, and the European Commission. More than 90 000 academic, government, industrial, and start-up researchers use it worldwide.

(Photo : Screenshot from SciNote Official Website)

You can easily organize all of your lab work with SciNote. To stay on track with everyone in the research team, you can review your work progress with an outline of current tasks, responsibilities, and impending deadlines through SciNote's convenient dashboard. To quickly see projects and dependencies, you can map your workflow processes in SciNote using a three-layered data structure (projects-experiments-tasks) and templates.

To keep everyone apprised and coordinated, you can partake in real-time contact with your colleagues by tagging them, providing comments, or following notifications. Then, use annotations and comments to cross-reference the data and simply trace back to the information you're searching for.

Additionally, you can easily create reports which will assist you in wrapping up the progress of your job, drawing conclusions, and defining what remains to be done. This is shareable with others in pdf or docx format.

Moreover, you can turn a workflow made of tasks that must be done in the correct sequence into a template using SciNote, should you need to duplicate or reuse a larger piece of work.

With SciNote, you can consider using the free ELN version tailored for personal use, or the premium version with many more tools along with a professional customer success manager to make sure that your unique needs are met. You can expect these following features from SciNote's free Electronic Lab Notebook:

SciNote Free Version Features

• Create research reports with just a few clicks.

• Compile all of your experimental protocols and research data under one roof and access them through the internet from anywhere.

• Keep track of your study progress using the SciNote dashboard.

• Arrange experiments using workflows to ensure you don't miss a step and that the findings are reproducible. Workflows in SciNote are a collection of linked tasks that must occur in a certain order for accomplishment.

• Create and edit Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files directly in SciNote, and import public protocols from protocols.io.

SciNote's free electronic lab notebook is geared at personal usage. This suits you best if you're a student working on your thesis or a post-doc developing your research projects. It simplifies keeping track of your research, improves research efficiencies, and saves you time when writing your paper.

However, if you want more than these features, such as lab management, collaboration, or even compliance tools, you may want to upgrade to the Premium Plan. It has all of the advantages of the free version, as well as the following features depending on the plan you choose:

SciNote Premium Essential Plan Features

• Team members can use collaboration tools to work on experiments, protocols, and analyses together. To keep everyone engaged, members can write comments and tag team members.

• It has team management tools to help control who has access to the data to maintain security, and to avoid data loss when a student or staff member departs the lab.

• Inventory management tools aid in the reduction of lab supply waste and prevent delays caused by missing materials.

Besides that, SciNote also offers the Validated Plan and the Platinum Plan, which include capabilities for satisfying compliance (i.e., FDA CFR 21 Part 11) and quality assurance (i.e., GxP) criteria. Premium subscriptions can add integrations of chemical sketching software ChemAxon, an AI-powered manuscript writer, stock management, and many more.

Key Highlights of SciNote

• SciNote gained the trust of NIH, FDA, USDA, and the European Commission.

• Over 90,000 scientists worldwide from university, government, industry, and startup laboratories use this ELN for data or lab inventory management and more.

• This online lab notebook features a logical project-based workflow structure rather than folders and notebook pages.

• It has an easy-to-use dashboard for planning and tracking the project's overall status, generating reusable templates and procedures, and increasing lab productivity.

• It allows students to learn how to structure and organize their research projects, one of the most distinctive offers available from any ELN software.

• SciNote's structure is adaptable, making it appropriate for various research subjects.

• It comes with a rich knowledge base, instructional YouTube videos, online classes, a LinkedIn user community, and email assistance. These are all available for free so students and lab members can quickly learn how to use SciNote. Premium plans come with additional onboarding and top-rated customer support.

SciNote makes your scientific data more discoverable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). You can quickly locate what you're looking for by conducting a quick search. This makes it possible to access and use data with future technologies. You can ensure that your study has a long-term influence.

Furthermore, SciNote is also an open-source lab notebook that promotes community building and open science. They aim to help humanity reap the most benefits from science while preserving research data for future generations.

Ditch traditional lab notetaking and streamline your research data documentation now! Sign up for the free version or begin your 14-day trial of any premium plan to get started. And, if you want to learn more about effectively establishing an ELN in an academic lab, this SciNote webinar offers an overview of how SciNote works in an academic environment.