Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) for Researchers and Scientists
Hi Obsidian Community,
I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on—a fully customizable Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) designed specifically for researchers and scientists. If you’re looking for a powerful, flexible way to manage your research notes, experiments, and data, this might be just what you need!
What is it?
The ELN vault I’ve created is built on top of Obsidian’s robust note-taking platform, offering a range of features tailored to the needs of scientific research. The vault is organized with a logical structure and comes with pre-configured templates to help you streamline your documentation process.
Pre-configured Templates: Ready-to-use templates for experiment planning, data collection, literature reviews, and more.
Organizational Structure: A logical folder setup that mirrors the typical workflow of a research project, making it easy to keep everything organized.
Task and Project Management: Integrated task management to help you track your research activities and stay on top of deadlines.
Powerful Linking and Tagging: Use Obsidian’s linking and tagging features to build connections between experiments, protocols, and data, creating a web of interconnected notes.
Who is it for?
This ELN vault is ideal for anyone involved in scientific research, whether you’re a solo researcher, part of a larger lab team, or a student looking for a better way to manage your research documentation.
How to Get Started:
Download Obsidian (if you haven’t already) from the official website.
Load the vault into Obsidian and start exploring the templates and features.
Customize the vault to suit your specific research needs!
Feedback and Contributions:
I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback! If you have any suggestions for improvements or additional features, feel free to drop a comment here or contribute directly on GitHub. Collaboration is always welcome.
Conclusion:
Obsidian is a powerful tool, and with this ELN vault, I hope to make it even more useful for the research community. I’m looking forward to seeing how others might use and expand on this project.
Thank you so much!!! I am really excited about this. I have been spending lots of time optimizing my ELN system. I am glad someone also have the same thing in mind.
I am excited to try this.
I opened the root directory as a vault, however I did not get any warning about plugin installation.
Is there a way to check if all the requisite plugins have been installed?
Friend you need to add ELN_vault folder; it has the .obsidian config folder.
The parent folder of ELN_vault (which is what you get on unzipping the zip file) is no use adding.
Yurcee is right. The actual vault folder is called “ELN_vault” and contains the .obsidian folder. If you import this folder as vault and not the top level folder you should be asked whether you want to enable the plugins. Hope you already got it working.
Don’t hesitate asking further question on how to use the ELN. I’m planing to make some YouTube tutorials in the future but don’t know when I’ll find the time to do so.
Just wanted to let you know that I recently started to develop a plugin to ease editing nested metadata. Unfortunately, obsidians own property editor doesn’t support nested metadata and there are no signs that the obsidian team plans to add this in the future. Since the ELN vault heavily relies on nested multi-level YAML to store the experimental metadata, I finally decided to code my very first obsidian plugin. Currently, my code just renders the YAML in a side panel, but I hope I’ll manage to add some editing capabilities soon.
Just as a small teaser, this is how the rendered YAML currently looks:
I would highly appreciate if some of you could share their experience with the current version of the ELN. Any feedback will help me to further improve the user experience or implement new functionality.
Hello there! First of al: thank you for this, it is AMAZING! I have been using it lately and I am already finding ways to improve my workflow with this.
To give you feedback, just 2 things:
I am having problems with the enhanced export settings: No references are shown, and many errors happen. I have solved it by using my previous workflow (pandoc references pugin, zotero integration, etc.)
For some reason, I can only add 2 operators in the metadata.
Thanks for the feedback. I would need a bit more information concerning your problems with the enhanced export settings. What export template did you use for export? Can you send me the pandoc error messages?
I will have a look into the second issue. I never tested the templates with more than two operators, so might be there is a bug in the templater script.
Hi! I’m going to try it out for structuring my research project, but it will probably take some time until I can give you feedback. I come from Neuroscience, so some of the functionality I will use will be different I suppose. Do you have anything specific you would like people to test and try out?
Also: I noticed the performance is a bit slower than my usual obsidian setup (the startup is fast!) but navigation in folders etc not so much. Anything you recommend or think where the culprit is?
The ELN actively uses the dataview plugin to create dynamic views of the metadata, or generate overview tables of samples, analyses and so on. Currently the “automatic view refreshing” option is turned on by default in the ELN and the refresh interval is 5000 ms. On a slower hardware that might indeed cause some performance issues. In addition, I noticed that when the dataviewjs containers are updated they may collapse and then grow again in size as they are filled with the updated content. This can be a bit annoying when in editing mode as it may cause the current line to move up and down on the screen. The only way to avoid that at the moment is to turn the “automatic view refreshing” option off. The only downside of this is that changes to the metadata will only be visible in the corresponding view containers after closing and reopening the note. I hope I could help.
