Today’s major issues, from pollution to health risks can be resolved by strong science. Researchers are working long hours in a highly competitive environment for their research to matter.
While younger generations, on one side, consider a floppy disk to be a 3D printed Save icon, the other side saved years on research on those disks and is still cutting and gluing print-outs with valuable scientific data into paper lab notebooks. A record-keeping method that is barely coping with today’s pace and amounts of digital data.
The transformation of a paper lab notebook, an unmissable tool in every lab, is heading towards electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) and eventually IoT, to make research records traceable, searchable and retrievable at any time.
In this article, on the example of SciNote ELN, we demonstrate that apart from other benefits, switching to an ELN has a significant impact on researchers’ productivity. ‘Time spent on writing reports dropped from 3 hours per week to 3 hours per month’, says A Alhourani, PhD student at University of Stavanger, Norway. By interviewing researchers and comparing the time they needed to perform their tasks prior and after the ELN implementation in their labs, we conclude that scientists can save 9 hours per week on average, by using an ELN.
The full results of the research can be found here.
