Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) are digital platforms that serve the same functions as traditional lab notebooks while offering enhanced capabilities that improve research efficiency and data integrity. Digital platforms can protect against data loss and facilitate information storage, access, searching, sharing, and archiving in ways that are not possible with traditional paper notebooks.

Enhanced ELN capabilities may include automatic timestamping, cosigning, audit trails, and permission management. These features facilitate greater research integrity and reproducibility, enhance team collaboration, and enable streamlined integration of lab notebooks within broader research and data management workflows.

Additionally, some ELNs may enable inventory or sample management, protocol management, version control, or communication and documentation features that exceed the functional scope of traditional lab notebooks.

While McMaster does not offer an enterprise-level ELN, this resource aims to assist McMaster researchers in choosing an ELN by offering introductory information and guidance. This information has been reviewed by Research Data Management Services, McMaster’s Information Security for Researchers team, McMaster Research Ethics Board (MREB) Ethics Office, and Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board (HiREB) Ethics Office.

The Use Cases provide quick recommendations and resources for a variety of user scenarios.

The ELN Features Table enables quick identification and comparison of some important selection criteria across a small, non-exhaustive sample of ELN options. 

The Additional Resources include other guidance documents about choosing and implementing an ELN, from sources such as Nature and the Centre for Open Science.