Why keep a good Lab Book ?  You are required to by first year lab! Part of your mark comes from inspection of the lab book.  Real experiments can take months or years to complete. You will never remember all the critical details.  In industrial and academic research considerable prestige and money can be involved in who did what and when. For this reason lab books are legal documents of record.  Research projects are often carried out in large teams. You need a permanent record of work done, experimental details, operating procedures etc need to be available, and, most critically, be understandable to other people.

What should a lab book be ?  A lab book should be a real time record of what you do in the lab as it happens. It should be :-  CompleteEverything goes in, including the mistakes.  ToughNo loose papers, graphs etc. Securely glue or staple things in (not scotch tape).  ClearThe lab book doesn’t have to be pretty, but it must be legible.  TrueRecord of what you see and do. Don’t embellish it, don’t draw plots of raw data the way you think they should look, draw them as they are.

How should the lab book be structured ?  For a given experiment your lab book should be structured in roughly the following way. Different experiments will come out slightly differently  Heading / Title.  Definitive data.  Date and time of start.  Data analysis + errors.  Aims.  Comparisons + conclusions.  Background.  Summary.  Description of set up.  Closure.  Initial set up and preliminary data.  Review. You may want to number your pages and leave the back pages for an index.

Some notes on Computing experiments.  Much of the “to do” list above for practical experiments also holds for the computing lab.  You should still keep a good lab record and note things like the nature of the problem you are trying to solve and the methods used by subroutines.  Some of the detail will be included in program comments. Listings, print outs etc should be securely attached to your lab book.  Document your programs carefully !

Neatness versus speed. Getting the balance correct.  If you spend too long keeping a “perfect” lab book you will not have any time to do the experiment! Get the balance between experiment and record keeping right.

Put in enough detail so that the meaning of tables and graphs is clear at a later date.  Don’t tippex out mistakes or cut out pages from the lab book. The “mistakes” are just as important as the main results. Messy but complete Neat but useless

Use of other people’s work.  Your report should be a unique record of your own work and be produced entirely by you.  Use of supporting material from books, papers etc is strongly encouraged. However any text or figures copied from a source other than your own unique work must be clearly referenced as such.  Use quotes or italics, reference to the original source etc to make it clear where your work stops and other people’s starts.  Failure to do this can result in severe penalties up to and including expulsion from the course and revocation of all awards including A levels.

 Unreferenced cutting and pasting of material from web pages, other peoples reports (including your partners), unreferenced quotations of text books and published papers will all be viewed as plagiarism.  Use of such material is often very obvious to the members of staff who mark reports and will be penalised in all cases.  In previous years students have lost all lab marks and a full course unit as a result of plagiarism.  It is up to you to make sure you do things correctly.

How To Reference Material The most usual way of referencing a paper, book, figure or quote in the text is to use a number clearly associated with the item you want to reference [1], an author name in brackets (Zweiback, 2000) or a superscript number 3. Chose one method and stick to it ! In the Bibliography you must give the full source for the reference. Bibliography [1] A P French. “Special Relativity”. p 18, MIT Introductory Physics Series, Nelson, London (1968). [Zweiback, 2000] J. Zweiback, R. A. Smith, T. E. Cowan, G. Hays, K. B. Wharton, V. P. Yanovsky and T. Ditmire. “Nuclear fusion driven by Coulomb explosions of large deuterium clusters”. Phys. Rev. Lett. Vol.84, No.12, pp (2000). [3] Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory internet site (Fusion Energy).

An Example of How To Do It Right The mass-energy equivalence is clearly a fundamental principle central to 20 th century physics. French [1] for example says that “The prime example of the mass-energy equivalence, to which we owe our continuing existence, is provided by thermonuclear reactions occurring in stars such as the sun”. Thermonuclear fusion reactions have been of interest to the scientific community for many years, and recent work carried out at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Zweiback, 2000) has shown how such reactions can now be undertaken using small scale, table top laser systems.

Reference Both Figures And Text Figure 1. Cross section for T+D, D+D and He 3 + D reactions as a function of plasma temperature in keV, from [3]. Figure 1 shows that the conditions required for these experiments are extremely difficult to reach due to the very high temperatures required to overcome the Coulomb barrier.

Wikipedia? Okay to start with, but don’t quote as a reference. Textbooks are useful as a general reference.

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