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<b><h4>How do you keep a record of your research?</h4></b>

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<b>Tessa van Walsum, PhD Researcher, University of Roehampton</b>

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I keep a record of my research in slow processes. So I work from literally anything I can find, it can be a Post-It that's lying around in my field station, or it can be piece of paper. And I start writing down some ideas or things or things that I've observed. And then afterwards, once I've started collecting some of the data and that piece of paper is getting a little bit full, I kind of end up using more bits of paper until it really forms a journal. And from there on, as soon as it's fixed in a journal, I tend to put it towards an Excel spreadsheet because I do like my numbers on a spreadsheet and immediately ready to go in the computer.

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Whereas on my journal, I can sort of indicate a day-to-day difference, if I change the camera or if I saw a specific behavior outside because I was studying penguins that day and the weather changed suddenly. And I tend to write that down just as a specific, oh by the way, general note for today's data, it was very sunny today. 

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<b>Professor Lewis Halsey, Professor of Environmental Physiology, University of Roehampton</b>

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I keep a record of my research in a digital format whenever I can. So what I mean by that is, I might collect some things in analogue fashion on notebooks or I'm handing out questionnaires to people or something like that. But I prefer to not have an ever-growing sort of pile of paper that gets in the way and is easily accessible by other people. So I'll scan, photograph, type up into Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, that sort of thing to make sure I've got everything in one nice, neat, hopefully neat, folder on my computer. 
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<b><h4>Why do you feel it is important to keep a secure record of what you have done?</h4></b>

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<b>Tessa van Walsum:</b> I think it's important to keep a good record of what I've done simply because if I want to look at the data afterwards, I need to know exactly what I did at that given point. Sometimes I find that I've got discrepancies in my data, and I'm not quite sure why. 

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And then that's always a wonder, is that simply what the data is or did something different happen that day? Was it particularly sunny? Was it very windy? Did I forget to add this multiplication? Or what did I essentially do? And I think that's the basis for me to keep a good record.

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It also makes it easier for me to explain further if I want to publish something in a discussion saying, actually, I did this, this and that, rather than, oh, I forgot step one or two. It's better for me to refer to those differences. 

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<b>Professor Lewis Halsey:</b> It's very important that I keep a secure record of what I've done because often I'm working with human participants and it's essential that all the information I have on those participants is kept anonymised and safe from anyone else. It's key that only I and they know about that information. 
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<b><h4>Have there been times when you should have kept a better record of your work?</h4></b>

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<b>Tessa van Walsum:</b> There have definitely been times where I have to keep better record of my work. One of the things I think I can draw from immediately is when I was doing my bachelors. I was helping out with a project and usually they're short-term projects working under a professor, and it was DNA extraction. To be very honest, I can't even remember what the short-term project was, but we had to extract DNA from a specific animal. 

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And we got results from that a few weeks afterwards. And then we realised that it was very different from what they expected. And then, of course, the question came back to me saying, OK, so how did you get these results exactly? Well, I'd made like a proper lab journal, as we were taught during our bachelors. I found out that a couple of the steps were missing and it could very well been that I added too much millimetre of a certain compound in there, which altered the results altogether. 

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So that was one of those, oh dear, I should have noted this down specifically for every time. But simply because I'd been doing it every day for the past eight weeks, it hadn't come to my mind that I had to write these things down because it felt so natural at the time. So that was definitely a learning moment for me, where I thought if I just kept meticulous record of it, that would have made my life a lot easier and I could have simply gone back to the professor and said, oh, sorry, I think I made a mistake here, rather than us having to go through the entire thing again to find out that it was probably a mistake. 