A Brief History of Lab Notebooks

Ella Watkins-Dulaney for Asimov Press.This essay will appear in our forthcoming book, “Making the Modern Laboratory.”Published research papers are far from literal accounts of the process of scientific discovery. In contemporary scientific practice, once publishable results are obtained, the actual path taken to reach them becomes more or less irrelevant. Dead ends and false trails are omitted, and out of the messy process of raw research emerges a coherent narrative following clean, linear line...