Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) offer a smarter, more connected way for researchers to capture, share, and manage experimental data, but convincing scientists to give up paper is no small task.
At the University of Southampton, a decade-long effort to implement ELNs has combined technical development with a deep understanding of academic workflows and human behaviour. Led by Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza, Principal Enterprise Fellow, and Dr Matthew Partridge, Senior Enterprise Fellow and Director of Outreach, the project focused not only on finding the right digital tools but also on ensuring they truly fit the way chemists work.
Over the course of the trial and rollout, the team faced challenges ranging from diverse research environments to user resistance. Yet, through careful integration, training, and support, more than 90% of participants opted to continue using the ELN. Researchers now enjoy faster access to past experiments, streamlined supervision, and a safer, more searchable repository of scientific knowledge. Beyond improving departmental efficiency, this initiative lays the foundation for wider adoption across other scientific fields, demonstrating how thoughtful implementation can transform research culture.
What was your role in this project?
Partridge: I’m a Senior Enterprise Fellow at the University of Southampton and Director of Outreach, where I lead much of our outreach and public engagement work. Within the ELN project, my role had two main components. The first was technical: working behind the scenes to make the system fit for purpose.
The second, closely linked to that, was ensuring it worked for real academic research. I’m an active chemist with over 20 years of research experience, so much of the technical integration focused on adapting the ELN to academic workflows. The aim was to align an existing ELN with established working practices so that, when it was rolled out across the department, people would see it as a genuinely useful tool rather than something they simply had to learn to use. My contribution therefore focused on how researchers would use the system in practice, alongside its technical implementation.
One of the biggest challenges is the diversity of research environments. We have over 100 researchers in the building, grouped into multiple labs working in very different areas of chemistry. A major part of the project was therefore about creating something that was genuinely useful, while also being flexible enough to work for as many researchers as possible. Designing a system that effectively serves everyone is a significant technical challenge.
Pearman-Kanza: I'm Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza Principal Enterprise Fellow at the University of Southampton. I've been researching implementing ELNs for over a decade now, which started as part of my PHD from 2014- 2018. at the time it was trying to understand, not just the technical barriers, but the human barriers, so the social technical issues facing people digitising their work. Why weren't they using these systems? Having come from a computer science background, it just seemed really crazy to me when people said, I still use paper.
Yeah. Then I helped out the sort of notion of, like my lab notebook, and I thought, Well, it seems really obviously that that should be a solution then. And then, kind of obviously, then went down the rabbit hole for the next decade about it, because obviously, it turned out it wasn't that simple. There's lots and lots of different ELNs, as Matthew said, there's a few different requirements across industry and academia.
Coming from a computer science background, it initially seemed strange to me that people still relied so heavily on paper. I started looking at the idea of a “my lab notebook” system and assumed it would be an obvious solution. That turned out not to be the case, and I ended up going down a much deeper research path over the next decade.
You mentioned human barriers. Did you notice differences between types of users, for example, between younger researchers and more established staff?
Pearman-Kanza: It depended heavily on the individual and on the research group they belonged to. Researchers whose supervisors supported ELN adoption were far more positive themselves, while those whose supervisors were opposed tended to resist it. This highlighted the need for a top-down approach. Support from group leads and, in particular, from the Head of Chemistry was critical to the successful rollout.
Resistance was less about age and more about how entrenched someone was in their existing workflows. For example, some third-year PhD students told me they liked the idea of ELNs but didn’t want to change with only a year left in their projects. This aligns with experiences at other universities: ELNs are most easily adopted by undergraduates, new PhD students, or staff who haven’t yet developed fixed working habits.
Partridge: From the trial data, one interesting outcome was that senior staff adopted the ELN more successfully than junior researchers. There were more dropouts among junior participants, and a small number chose to return to paper afterwards. Overall, however, around 90% of participants said they would prefer to continue using an ELN, which we considered a major success.
All group leads involved in the trial chose to continue with the ELN. They cited improved supervision, better visibility of their group’s work, and easier consolidation of research outputs for publication. Any resistance we observed did not correlate with age or seniority in the way people often expect. Senior staff tended to recognise the benefits more quickly.
Could you talk briefly about how the trial transitioned into the full rollout? What type of ELN did you choose, and how was that decision made?
Pearman-Kanza: We selected a commercial ELN that worked for us both as a university and as part of the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI) project, which funds Matthew’s and my time. PSDI’s mission is to provide better infrastructure, data, and software tools for the physical sciences community, including improved process recording and data capture. This project also builds on similar work we’ve done with other universities, such as Nottingham.
There are many ELNs available, and what we’ve learned about implementation applies broadly across all of them. We don’t endorse one system over others. We chose Signals primarily because our department already uses ChemDraw, and Signals is developed by the same company. That interoperability, along with licensing compatibility, made it a good fit for us. Other systems would likely work just as well for other institutions.
For the trial, we purchased 50 one-year licences. Once we analysed and presented the results, we expanded to a larger licence purchase covering all staff and undergraduates in the school for the foreseeable future. Signals sat in the middle of the price range, included ChemDraw integration, and met enough of our requirements to justify a trial.
Regardless of the platform chosen, significant work is always required to implement and roll out an ELN effectively. None of the available systems were ready to use “off the shelf” for our context. Success came from the way we integrated the system into existing workflows, provided training, and supported users throughout the process.
What were the benefits of this project?
Pearman-Kanza: I’m genuinely pleased that people have moved from paper to wanting to use these systems. That’s a significant achievement. My 2018 paper was titled Electronic Lab Notebooks: Can They Replace Paper?, and one of the conclusions of my PhD, which I completed in early 2018, was that people simply weren’t ready to give paper up yet. At the time, it felt like an almost impossible task. We had a strong understanding of why people resisted the change and what the barriers were, but it seemed insurmountable.
The fact that we’ve not only implemented a system, but that over 90% of users now want to continue using a digital notebook, is hugely encouraging. People have recognised the benefits. Academics have said they now have better oversight of their students’ and staff’s work, and researchers are able to share and collaborate more easily, which is one of the core purposes of ELNs. Having everything in one place is extremely valuable.
I also hope that this is leading to higher-quality research outputs, which was one of our main goals in designing structured templates and workflows. It’s particularly exciting for the school that we’re training researchers to use industry-standard tools.
Partridge: From my perspective, and from discussions with research groups, there are two immediate advantages that became clear once people started using the ELN. The first is searchability. Researchers can search their notes and quickly find work they did months ago. That ability to ask, “What did I do three months ago?” and instantly retrieve the answer is extraordinarily useful. Even if the notes themselves aren’t perfect, users can still see when an experiment was done, what materials were used, and how it fits into their wider work. This is consistently the most-used feature and helps people avoid duplicating experiments.
The second major advantage, at a school level, is the centralised health and safety system. Managing health and safety in a large and diverse department is challenging, particularly ensuring engagement, auditability, and compliance. Linking health and safety documentation directly to experiment notebooks has been transformative. It allows rapid access to all relevant information if an incident occurs and ensures appropriate responses can be made quickly.
More importantly, it enables prevention. Supervisors can see an overview of activity across the department and identify potential issues early. For example, if someone flags the use of an explosive compound in a risk assessment, this appears on the dashboard, allowing the team to start a conversation before anything goes wrong. This proactive approach is far more effective than reacting after an incident, and it’s enabled by having everything in a single connected system.
Is there anything you're looking at for the future of this project that you would like to do that you haven't done already?
Pearman-Kanza: We’d like to bring more people from across the university into this. In fact, I can already see emails coming in from colleagues in other departments. We don’t want this to remain a chemistry-only project. While it started in chemistry and was designed to meet our institutional needs, it works first and foremost as a school-level initiative.
Because of the way the licensing model works, we currently have access to more licences than we need within the School of Chemistry. Even if every member of the school had a licence, we would still have capacity. That puts us in a strong position to explore how this could work for other laboratory-based disciplines, such as Cancer Sciences, Medicine, or Biology.
The key question now is whether we can adapt the ELN to meet the needs of those disciplines. And if this particular system isn’t the right fit for them, can we use what we’ve learned to help them run their own trials and drive similar cultural change within their schools?
Partridge: From my perspective, we’ve addressed many of the broader challenges around ELN adoption in chemistry and the sciences. I am keen to ensure that others don’t have to spend years solving the same problems. The journey we’ve been through, developing training approaches, user onboarding, permission structures, group-sharing models, and governance processes, has been highly valuable.
What I’d really like to do is package all of that learning and share it as widely as possible, so other universities can replicate our success, whether they’re using a different ELN or working in a different research area. As part of our PSDI outputs, we’ll be producing a white paper and at least two detailed case studies on how we approached this. All of that will be publicly available for other institutions to use.
My hope is that by sharing this work openly, we can help other universities avoid repeating the same challenges. We’ll continue to support our own rollout, but the next step is enabling others to start and succeed with theirs.
