When we picture the scholarly record, we tend to think of its end products: the published paper, the deposited dataset, the citation. But each of those is the visible tip of a much larger body of work — the active, day-to-day conduct of research, where experiments are designed and run, samples processed, instruments operated and observations recorded. For generations this working phase was captured, if at all, in the paper laboratory notebook: a bound book on a bench, legible only to its author, locked in a drawer, and disconnected from everything else. An immense amount of crucial information about how research is actually done remained invisible to the wider record. The electronic lab notebook and the structured record-keeping practices around it are changing that. This article looks at how, drawing on the research-lifecycle domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
What an electronic lab notebook is
An electronic lab notebook, or ELN, is software that replaces the paper notebook as the place where researchers record their day-to-day work: experiments, protocols, observations, results and the reasoning behind decisions. At its simplest, an ELN offers obvious practical advantages over paper — it is searchable, backed up, shareable, and resistant to the coffee stains and illegible handwriting that have plagued laboratory science forever. But its deeper significance is that it makes the working record digital and therefore connectable. A paper notebook is an island; an electronic one can be linked to the protocols it follows, the instruments and samples it references, the data files it produces and the people who did the work. The ELN is the point at which the active phase of research enters the connected world that the rest of the record already inhabits.
Capturing the active phase as connected metadata
This is the central idea: the ELN lets the active phase of research be captured as connected metadata rather than disappearing into a drawer. When work is recorded electronically and linked properly, a rich web of relationships can be built around it — this experiment used that protocol; it was performed by these people on that instrument; it consumed these samples and produced these data files; it belongs to this project and contributes to that publication. The working phase stops being a black box between the start of a project and its outputs, and becomes a documented, navigable part of the record. This matters for reproducibility, because others can see exactly how a result was produced; for collaboration, because the record is shared rather than siloed; and for integrity, because the chain from question to result is visible rather than reconstructed after the fact.
FAIR principles for the working record
The same FAIR principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — that govern published data apply, with equal force, to the records created during the active phase. An ELN that captures structured, well-described records makes the working record findable and reusable in a way a paper notebook never could be. The principle is that good data management should not begin at the moment of deposit, when a project ends, but should run through the entire lifecycle, starting at the bench. If records are created in a structured, connected form from the outset, preparing data for deposit becomes a matter of harvesting and tidying what already exists, rather than reconstructing it. Good record-keeping during the active phase is, in this sense, the foundation of good data management overall.
Provenance: the PROV standard
A particular strength of structured electronic record-keeping is its capacity to capture provenance — the record of how something came to be: what data was used, what processes acted on it, what agents (people, software, instruments) were involved, and in what order. Provenance is the basis of trust in a result, because it lets others trace exactly how that result was produced and verify each step. The PROV standard provides a formal, machine-readable model for expressing provenance — describing the entities, activities and agents in a process and the relationships between them — so that the chain of how a result was produced can be recorded consistently and understood across systems. An ELN that captures provenance in line with such a standard turns the working record into something far more powerful than a diary: a verifiable account of how knowledge was made.
Identifying the work itself: activity identifiers
If the active phase is to be connected to the rest of the research landscape, the work itself needs to be identifiable. Persistent identifiers have transformed how we refer to outputs and people; the same logic is now being applied to research activities. RAiD (the Research Activity Identifier) is a persistent identifier for research projects and activities, providing a stable handle for the work itself — not just its eventual outputs. With an activity identifier, the records captured in an ELN, the data produced, the people involved and the resulting publications can all be tied to a single, persistent identity for the project. The whole arc of a piece of research — from the work as it happens to the products it yields — can then be traced as a connected whole rather than a set of disconnected fragments.
A consistent vocabulary across the lifecycle
For records created at the bench to connect with everything downstream — data repositories, CRIS platforms, publications — the elements they contain must mean the same thing everywhere: what a protocol, a sample, an instrument or an activity denotes. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that the record captured in an electronic lab notebook is understood identically wherever it flows. And because the work recorded there — investigation, data curation, methodology — is genuine contribution, it can be described in the same framework used for every output, the CRediT taxonomy and its full set of contribution roles. The electronic lab notebook brings the most hands-on phase of research into the connected record; structured record-keeping, provenance and activity identifiers let that phase take its rightful place in the story of how knowledge is made.