Sir

In response to your editorial, “Surviving misconduct is one thing, accountability is another”, as individuals who have been embroiled in the process we find the recommendations offered to be laudable (Nature 395, 727; 1998). However, we would like to offer the following observations regarding the daunting task of interpreting laboratory records, some dated more than 10 years ago.

It is not sufficient that institutions should require “good laboratory notebooks” to be kept, and archive them for 10 years. More attention should be given to the process by which laboratory data are recorded. Each laboratory and each scientist has different standards and methods of recording data. Notebooks are highly individualized. As a result, even review of the data contained in “good” notebooks after ten years is opaque to those not involved in the experiments, and in many cases to the experimenters themselves.

Even the best notebooks suffer too many lapses in the recording of data to provide an unequivocal picture of the experiments and the results obtained. Such shortcomings make trying to reconstruct what may have gone wrong a decade earlier difficult, if not impossible.

We suggest the adoption of a standardized recording protocol like that used in medicine. Medical records serve to establish standard procedures. Laboratory research records should adhere to guidelines established by the institution for the recording of data obtained from specific procedures. These records should address certain components in the recording of data from standard procedures used by most labs. In this manner, a uniformity in the recording of data would be established that would serve (as a medical chart does) not only to allow those procedures to be reproduced but also as a detailed record which adheres to a commonly accepted standard for certain lab procedures.

In the absence of standardized guidelines, the review of individualized notebooks and the ability of researchers to adhere to “institutional” targets will fall short of providing a mechanism for preventing misconduct and ensuring accountability in research. Enforcement from above is one thing, but it is equally important to establish consistent procedures for the education of staff in recording data.

This would aid the scientific community and help minimize the adversarial episodes that can emerge from the lack of common guidelines.