[doctorpangloss]

To your specific point, the legal issues are so idiosyncratic. You can’t write an article about them. You can’t tease out the difference between “this is a best practice everyone should follow” and “the patent lawyer is selling the holistic social experience of compliance,” which is the non-trial attorney’s primary product. It’s the same energy as DocuSign: when your biggest competitor is a pen, you know all the bullshit they peddle about timestamps and tracking and custody is just that, bullshit.

It really comes down to, what is your role? Are you making discoveries or working for people who do? Both are very worthy. In my experience, the PIs - and their subordinates who become PIs - they aren’t thinking very hard about lab notebooks and their tactics vary widely. No best practices. However they are focused on maximizing the amount of serendipity they can have per unit time, which tends to devalue how you’re documenting stuff for patent lawyers.

Does Benchling have a manifesto about why you should care about lab notebooks? No. It has a ton of little reactive opinions that are relevant to its sales pipeline. But nothing like “Agile, except for life sciences” which incorporates their software. It’s everything to all people, like most life science software. I know people receive huge grants on promising discoveries in life sciences, and some of their labs have Benchling licenses and don’t use them. The people first authoring the papers use lab notebooks of course, but see this as a small part of their process.

[analog31]

I just looked up Benchling. My first impression is that it's enterprise software. You're not expected to just buy a license and start using it, and being the first user at your site won't gain you much over what you're using right now.

Where I think software like that gains its use is when you have multiple people working on similar research or processes, and trying to manage that kind of research and the data that it generates. At the extreme, I see job openings like this:

Wanted, quality control chemist for third shift...

On the other hand, I work in a "small lab" setting. I'm often the only person working on a project. No two of my projects resemble one another, though there are themes that progress through my work, and tools that I re-use and share. My choice of a notebook system, if you can grace it with such a description, is almost solely for my own benefit.