What if you could improve the way research is captured, shared, and reproduced—across institutions, disciplines, and the globe?
That’s the question that sparked Dr. Samantha Pearman-Kanza’s journey. Samantha Pearman-Kanza, PhD has spent over a decade exploring how Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) can transform scientific research.
Her passion began during her PhD, in 2014, when she discovered how deeply entrenched paper-based lab practices were. “What do you mean? People are still using paper in the labs?” she recalls asking. It was this disbelief – and her background in computer science and socio-technical aspects of implementing and evolving technology, that inspired her to dedicate her research to digitising and improving lab practices.
“Better data underpins everything—publications, reuse, collaboration, and AI. We won’t get the full potential from these technologies without improving how we capture and describe data.”
This research, carried out through the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI), is the culmination of years of consultation, research, and advocacy. It isn’t just about software. It’s about fundamentally reshaping how research is recorded, validated, and passed on.
How can Electronic Notebooks elevate research practice
For researchers, ELNs offer more than digital convenience, they enable better quality research. Lab notes become:
- Easier to find
- Safer to store
- Simpler to share
ELNs also streamline collaboration:
- Supervisors gain clearer oversight of student work
- New team members can onboard faster by accessing historical experiments
- Structured templates prompt researchers to capture data more accurately and consistently, laying the groundwork for reproducibility and innovation
Shaping the Future of Physical Sciences Research
Physical sciences, long reliant on handwritten notes, are poised for a transformation.
By supporting data standardisation and better experiment traceability, ELNs have the potential to elevate the quality of research across disciplines. Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza explains, “We are trying to elicit better information capture… a lot of information is lost before it even gets to the lab book.”They’re not just tools for better record-keeping—they’re foundations for producing better science.
Through partnerships with institutions like Nottingham and PSDI’s involvement in cross-university initiatives, the research team has explored various ELN platforms—from OneNote to purpose-built systems like AI4Green. As Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza puts it, “I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. If something’s already out there, I want to use it.”These trials help define best practice and avoid one-size-fits-all solutions.
Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza explains, “We’re also talking to the library—sharing what we’ve done in Chemistry so they can pass it on to Biology, Physics, and beyond.”After all, physical sciences vary widely in their digital maturity, safety requirements, and experiment types.
The University of Southampton trial
“We should obviously be doing things digitally, but just because you’ve made it digital doesn’t mean you’ve done it well.”
So, the team have meticulously planned the rollout, establishing:
- User groups
- Permissions
- Safety protocols
- Templates
- Monthly training sessions
“The ELN is one part of a much wider digital ecosystem that you need to use in the lab.”
A key learning has been the importance of dedicated staff time and cross-departmental collaboration, Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza describes it as “a real cross-departmental effort”with support from other PSDI researchers, IT, health and safety teams, and administrators.
Early feedback from students, has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting the system’s usability, improved data accessibility, and enhanced supervisor visibility. “Supervisors and students have much easier access to each other’s work. Supervisors can find, view and sign research tasks off seamlessly.”shares Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza.
The first-year PhD students have been especially open to the change, having not yet formed deep-rooted habits. Their enthusiasm offers a glimpse into the future of research culture becoming:
- Digital-first
- Collaborative
- Data-savvy
By providing structure through templates and enabling real-time collaboration, the ELN is already proving to be more than just a digital replacement for paper notebooks. “Templates help researchers record experiments properly—we’re not leaving them with a blank piece of paper; we’re guiding them to capture the right information.”It’s laying the groundwork for better data, more efficient research workflows, and a more collaborative research culture.
Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza explains that even at this early stage in the trial, “We’ve demonstrated this isn’t impossible. It’s just hard. But it’s worth doing, because of the long-term benefits to the research process.”
Global Impact and the Road Ahead
During COVID-19 the scientific community shared data openly and urgently. Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza hopes “ELNs will facilitate researchers collaborating more for good, rather than just to combat disasters.” Making this kind of openness the norm, not the exception. The long-term vision for this research is that ELNs become so embedded in scientific practice that sharing lab records becomes as common as publishing papers.
“Publishing lab notebooks alongside papers would increase transparency, improve reproducibility, and help others truly build on the research.”
With machine-readable formats, researchers could one day transfer lab data seamlessly across platforms and institutions, improving:
- Portability
- Reproducibility
- Trust in scientific discoveries
“If we can create machine-readable formats between ELNs, we open the door to global research portability and integration.”
“As systems become more common, I hope people will trust them more. That trust will enable broader international collaboration and data reuse.”
Credits:
Matthew Partridge, Andrew Hector, Philip Leadbitter, Cerys W., Sally Bloodworth, Peace Nwafor, Jonathan Hirst, and Mark Gouldingfor their contribution to the ELN trial and research.
University of Nottingham AI4Green University of Glasgow University of Southampton