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[[File:|right|350px]] Title: Is there a benefit to utilizing both a LIMS and an ELN in the lab?

Author for citation: Shawn E. Douglas

License for content: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Publication date: March 2023

Introduction

The ELN and what it does outside the scope of a LIMS

To answer the question, knowledge of what an ELN does and what it addresses outside of a LIMS is important. An ELN is a modern electronic equivalent of the traditional paper-based laboratory notebook, which historically has served as a collection of scribblings—often with individual, regional, or temporal idiosyncratic styles of "subjectivity, unruliness, and privacy"^[1]—concerning the notes and protocols of one or more particular scientific research endeavors.^[1]^[2] In recent times, these scribblings have become more recognizably organized and thorough as a necessary part of presenting all the details of experiments, observations, and analyses such that the results can be reproduced and verified by peers in the scientific community (often referred to as part of a broader "reproducibility crisis").^[2]^[3]^[4] As laboratory research has increasingly incorporated more digital sources of data and information from instruments and other sources, labs conducting research today have had to necessarily look at old paper notebook formats as antiquated and incompatible with modern research methods and increasingly digitalized workflows.^[2]^[3]

As a modern substitute for the paper-based laboratory notebook, the ELN at its core intends to similarly provide a means to document experiments, observations, and analyses but in a more organized, consistent, readable, searchable, and shareable way. Because it is software, additional thought has gone into the development of an ELN to allow users to do their research more effectively while integrating with other digital instruments and software solutions to capture and manage data and information closer to real-time. As a result, today's ELNs take many shapes and forms, many of them being developed to address the needs of specific research activities, such as genetic sequencing or chemical analysis.