Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) offer a smarter, more connected way for researchers to capture, share, and manage experimental data. However, persuading scientists to move away from paper is no small task.
At the University of Southampton, a decade-long initiative to implement ELNs combined technical development with a deep understanding of academic workflows and human behaviour. Led by Samantha Pearman-Kanza, Principal Enterprise Fellow, and Matthew Partridge, Senior Enterprise Fellow and Director of Outreach, the project focused not only on identifying suitable digital tools but also on ensuring they aligned with the way chemists actually work.
Over the course of the trial and rollout, the team encountered challenges ranging from diverse research environments to user resistance. Through careful integration, comprehensive training, and sustained support, more than 90% of participants chose to continue using the ELN. Researchers now benefit from faster access to previous experiments, streamlined supervision, and a safer, searchable repository of scientific knowledge.
Beyond improving efficiency within the department, the initiative has laid the groundwork for wider adoption across other scientific disciplines, demonstrating how thoughtful implementation can transform research culture.
What was your role in the project?
Samantha Pearman-Kanza: I’m Principal Enterprise Fellow at the University of Southampton. I’ve been researching the implementation of ELNs for more than a decade, beginning during my PhD from 2014 to 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.
Coming from a computer science background, it seemed strange to me that people relied so heavily on paper. I began considering an electronic lab notebook system and assumed it would be an obvious solution. That proved not to be the case, and I ended up pursuing a much deeper line of research over the next decade.
Matthew 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 the first, was ensuring that it worked for genuine academic research. I’m an active chemist with more than 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.
You mentioned human barriers. Did you observe differences between user types?
SP-K: It depended heavily on the individual and on the research group they belonged to. Researchers whose supervisors supported ELN adoption were more positive themselves, whereas those whose supervisors opposed it 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 roll-out.
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.
MP: 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 returned to paper afterwards. Overall, approximately 90% of participants indicated that 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.
How did the trial transition into a full rollout? What type of ELN did you choose?
SP-K: 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 our 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 the lessons learned about implementation apply broadly across them. We don’t endorse one system over others. We chose Revvity Signals primarily because our department already uses ChemDraw, [which 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 effort is required to implement and deploy an ELN effectively. None of the available systems were ready to use “off the shelf” for our context. Success resulted from integrating the system into existing workflows, providing training and supporting users throughout the process.
What have been the benefits of the project?
SP-K: I’m genuinely pleased that people have moved from paper to using these systems. That’s a significant achievement.
My 2018 paper was entitled ‘Electronic Lab Notebooks: Can They Replace Paper?’, and one of the conclusions of my PhD, which I completed earlier that year, was that people were not yet ready to give up paper.
At the time, it felt like an almost impossible task. We had a strong understanding of why people resisted the change and of the barriers, but it seemed insurmountable.
The fact that we’ve not only implemented a system but that more than 90% of users now want to continue using a digital notebook is highly 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.
MP: 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. The 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 the 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 enables rapid access to all relevant information in the event of an incident and ensures that appropriate responses can be made promptly.
More importantly, it enables prevention. Supervisors can have an overview of departmental activity and identify potential issues early. For example, if someone flags the use of an explosive compound in a risk assessment, this is displayed on the dashboard, allowing the team to initiate 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 one 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?
SP-K: 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. 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?
MP: 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 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 roll-out, but the next step is enabling others to start and succeed with theirs.
Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza is a Principal Enterprise Fellow at the University of Southampton. Doctor Matthew Partridge is a Senior Enterprise Fellow (PSDI) at the same university.
