Source
r/chemistry•
O2_AC

PhD question: How to keep track of results

Hey guys, I started my PhD a while ago and I'm constantly trying to establish a neat system to keep track of all my results. Since I'm mostly doing catalysis, I wish I had a system where I can put in all my reactions with their regarding results and apply any filters I want. For example, just listing all reactions with a certain substrate concentration, or all reactions which have more than x% of a certain product. Ideally I can put all my raw data into the system (GC tables, qNMR integrals, sample weights, you name it) so that I have always access to everything I want.

Right now I do have a quite sophisticated Excel spreadsheet for my GC analysis, but due to the way it is build, I can not manually enter reactions where I've done qNMR analysis for example. Also the spreadsheet is quite big already, so adding even more information doesn't really seem like a valuable option at the moment.

So what I basically would like to know is, how do you do it? :D

Posted May 11, 2018, 6:39 PM UTC

28
futureforester104•

Access is your friend

6
O2_ACOP•

Do you have like any further information on that? Like a helpful example? :D

1
mitchandreGeneral•

It's like a type of database. Databases are used to store like large data. I can't think of a good example, but they are easy to learn, and since you know excel really well it won't like take you that much longer to figure out; even though it is still like different.

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
kono_hito_wa•

3 likes

1
mitchandreGeneral•

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/992/401/e37.png

1
novel_yet_trivialAnalytical•

Or any database program.

1
novel_yet_trivialAnalytical•

This is a universal problem. Very big expensive programs exist to help, but in the end the best solution is the one that makes sense to you. For me, I organized the data into folders and used hyperlinks in my electronic notebook to crosslink. In your case it sounds like you want a database of some sort. You may also want to invest some time in learning a basic programming language like python, which will help you search through thousands of result files for something you want.

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ElXGaspethMaterials•

I actually really like OneNote. You can sync to a network location, paste images and if it's a screenshot you can actually make the text searchable or copy it out.

1
Typhon_ragewind•

Never used it much, but check out SciNote

1