Dear esteemed ladies and gentlemen working with me on various research projects, Please take note of the boring text below. And don’t say you weren’t warned: All laboratory experiments must be recorded and documented in a laboratory journal (log). Any experiment of any kind and for any purpose that has not been properly recorded and described is strictly forbidden. (Even if you think the experiment you performed is unimportant or irrelevant, remember that there have been quite a few precedents where discoveries were made by accident, unintentionally, or by mistake.) A laboratory journal is an official document, and its proper maintenance is your responsibility. You must mark the date the journal was opened, the date it was closed, and your identifying details. (All of this so that it is possible to “designate you as the culprit” in case of missing data, falsification, deliberate inconsistency, etc. — God forbid!) The pages in your laboratory journal are numbered, and it is forbidden to tear out or remove pages. (So no one can claim that pages were removed in order to falsify results.) The journal is kept in English. (Years ago I worked with a Chinese postdoc whose journal was mostly in English, but with occasional lines in Chinese. X, my boss at the time, suspected these might contain important research insights and invested considerable effort in finding someone to translate them. When he finally succeeded, it turned out the Chinese passages said things like “I’m so sick of looking at X’s face! I can’t take working with him anymore” — and so on.) All calculations, observations, analysis sheets, microscope images, etc. must be attached to the journal pages in a manner that prevents any possibility of falsification (for example, with good adhesive, or with a thread and a notary stamp of your choice). No results that form part of your research may be stored anywhere other than the laboratory journal. (Yes, yes, I know — it’s inconvenient, it’s not pretty, the journal gets too thick to close, it seems like a waste of pages, and so on. Please forget all of that, and I mean exactly what I say.) Electronic files and documents must be documented in the journal: on the day of measurement, you must record the file names, the folder on the computer where they are saved, and a brief description of each file. Friends, I hate threatening people. Nevertheless, please do not think that what is written above was written for nothing. These are the rules of the game in science today. Either you comply with them, or you leave research immediately. I hope I have made myself sufficiently clear.
Thoughts about the work and in its vicinity