Electroninc Lab Notebooks (ELNs)

The October 2021 lunch session of the FRDN Knowledge Hub discussed the variety of ELNs and the methodology to choose a suitable ELN for your institution. It was followed by 2 demos given by experienced researchers from Hasselt University who zoomed in on the use of ELNs in life sciences (neurology and chemistry). At the end of the presentation, we launched a poll to get an overview of the interinstitutional status of ELNs in the Flemish landscape.

We explored the following topics:

What is an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN)? What are the benefits of an ELN? How to choose your ELN while there are so many different choices? How to start with an ELN in your institution?

Hasselt University started a working group in 2020 to find out the needs of their researchers and to find the most suitable ELNs. The benefits are the following: easy collaboration, user-friendly searchability and prevention of data loss. But it became very clear that the wide variety of ELNs (> 45 ELNs) makes it difficult for researchers to choose the most suitable ELN .

Hasselt University chose to work bottom-up because “A tool will only be as good as it will be used”. This is why Hasselt University wanted researchers themselves to be motivated to use an ELN rather than to impose a tool on them.

Following the demos, we held a Q&A in which we answered the following pressing questions:

How can you handle the diverse needs of multiple research disciplines?

An institution should not provide access to just one ELN, but should make sure that multiple, diverse ELNs are promoted. That way, researchers from different disciplines can find the right tool for their research project. However, institutions should not offer too many different ELNs, because they should  be able to train and support researchers for each tool. In addition, it would be easier for researchers within the same institution to collaborate if most of them use the same ELN. It would be even more interesting if researchers from different institutions could collaborate using the same tool. To realize that, Flemish research institutions would need to decide on providing access to and/or promoting the same ELNs. It would be most efficient to choose one or two generic ELNs and one or two discipline-specific ones, with a preference for those that are user-friendly and do not need much training or explanation.

How can an ELN be used in the social and human disciplines?

In the humanities (e.g. psychology) an ELN could be useful too, although humanities researchers are usually not working with lab experiments. However, the tool allows them to document their data, create a DOI and a citation for their work, for a project, etc. There are many features designed for specific research projects, but we would advise to use a generic ELN like OSF, because it focuses on organizing data and files in folder structures rather than keeping track of experimental results.

What would be a good starting point to search for a suitable ELN for a specific discipline? For  example, is there a general survey on all existing ELNs, ordered by discipline?

To choose the right ELN for your discipline, it would be best to first conduct an audit at your institution to determine which ELNs researchers are currently using and what their (other) needs are. Then you can look at user experiences of the suggested ELNs and try out some new ones that are currently already used in the Flemish and international research landscape. You can find a freely available general comparison matrix on the variety of ELNs here: Harvard Medical School, Cambridge. You can also consult the List of requirements (JISC) of the “must haves”, “good to haves” and “nice to haves” for ELNs created by JISC and Glasgow University.

Can an ELN be used in all research disciplines that require lab work? Does "lab work" here include field work, surveys, etc.?

Yes, it seems like most ELNs are designed mainly for this purpose. To document field work some of the ELNs can even be used on a tablet or smartphone. The ELNs that Hasselt University chose did not include surveys except for the electronic data capture program that was chosen to capture data from clinical trials. 

How do other Flemish Research Institutions support the use of ELN’s for their researchers?

A live poll at the end of the lunch sessions mapped the use of ELNs in the other Flemish research institutions (ca. 20 participants). Based on these results, it is clear that ELNs are still in a start-up phase:

•   Approximately 70% of the participants indicated that ELNs are used within their institutions, while 25% do not know.
•   The ELNs used were SLIMS, Signals, ELabFTW, OSF, Castor, Benchling, Lab Guru, Labfolder and Findings. VIB developed their own ELN.
•   At the moment it looks like Signals, ELabFTW and OSF are used in several institutes in the Flemish landscape.
•   75% of the ELNs are technically and financially supported by an institution. 
•     50 % of the institutions are planning to implement ELNs in the future.

If there are further questions about ELNs do not hesitate to contact me at  hanne.vlietinck@uhasselt.be. You can find my zenodo page here for more info on how to choose an ELN for your institution.

As a takeaway from the lunch session I would like to highlight that it is one of the requirements of Open Science to document and organize your data appropriately. An ELN is an essential and handy tool/ platform to do this and prevent data loss. The first challenge is to choose suitable ELNs that fit most needs of researchers. The second challenge is to make sure that these ELNs will actually be used.

“A tool is only as good as it will be used”.