This is a summary of my strategy for documentation, backup and planning. For documentation, I write my tasks daily in my personal lab book. In this way I can transfer blocks of text to other documents, such as reports or presentations. In addition, I commit all new versions of my "lab-book.tex" to GIT. In this way I have a backup and can easily access the same documentation in different computers. I also use GIT for my codes for this same purpose and also for version control. For planning, a simple paper notebook and google calendar work very well for me. For planning, you could also try Trello https://trello.com/ or similar tools. The visual scheme below illustrates my organization strategy.

This repository contains a tutorial on how to create a computational Lab Book using Latex. It is aimed at researchers who want to start creating documents with Latex and/or better organize their work information.

There are different ways to document your work. I divide them into linear or graph. When you write every task one after the other in a report-type document, such as lab-book.tex or lab-book.docx, you have a linear documentation. This is the most common one and is done by scientists in the wet lab. They start each section with a date and write down all experiments. Another alternative is a wiki, which has a graph type structure. Instead of writing each task after the other, you create different wikis and refer them to one another via a hyperlink. This can be done in GITHub or GITLab with markdown.

If you choose Latex, start by downloading this repository on your machine and follow the tutorial: Activity_LabBook-with-LaTex_MBWC.pdf. In this was, you can easily transfer whole blocks of information to other documents, such as reports, presentations, articles and even your Masters or PhD thesis. This will substantially decrease the time and effort you put into formatting documents, since Latex does that using the class you specified.

Starting to learn Latex by writing a Lab Book is very good, since you will have enough time to get used to the Latex language and fix eventual errors. The learning time is significant, especially for non-computer scientists, so be aware of that when you start. It takes some months to feel completely comfortable with Latex, which requires patience and persistence. This effort pays off, since you will have almost no problems with citations, formatting and numbering of figures and tables.

Latex is the prefered choice by most researchers of computer science, mathematics and other hard sciences, because of its professional and beautiful formatting. It is however not used much in the biological and medical sciences, likely because of its technical character. Students of a more biological background should however not feel discouraged. You do not need to have any prior computational knowledge to learn Latex. By following this tutorial, you can easily create your first computational Lab Book. With it, you will increasingly feel more comfortable creating any document with Latex. It can be a very owerful tool to organize your work and create documents.

If you do not wish to learn Latex, you can use word or google docs to create a linear report. There is an example available in this repository: lab-book.docx. What is important is that you write every day and backup your document.

Below follows an example of a graph structure, which I implemented in the form of a wiki using GITLab and markdown. In this case, I have a "Home" wiki, in which I write my priorities in a list and refer to their individual wikis, such as "database" or "cluster", with hyperlinks.

Obtaining the repository

This repository can be accessed in Linux, MacOS or Windows computers.

To obtain the repository in a Unix machine (Linux or MacOS) and use it locally, you can clone the repository in the terminal with the following command line:

git clone https://github.com/waltercostamb/Lab-Book

Alternatively, for Linux, MacOS and Windows, you can download the repository directly from the GITHub webpage.

Organizing your workspace

For more details on organization of your workspace, refer to the file Organization_workshop.pdf contained in this repository.

Tutorial

To create your own Latex computational Lab Book, refer to the file Activity_LabBook-with-LaTex_MBWC.pdf contained in this repository.

Author

Maria Beatriz Walter Costa
https://github.com/waltercostamb