ELN is an Electronic Lab Notebook for scientists of all stripes

ELN is great for:

• Taking notes during experiments since it automatically saves your input every 10 seconds so that your notes will never be lost;
• Keeping track of data analysis results since screen shots and other graphics can be added to a notebook page by drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste;
• Recording your lit searches, since it will automatically download papers from PubMed and archive them with your notebook;
• Recording your thought processes, since it will never get in the way of your typing with arbitrary constraints on input formatting.

ELN is quite mature and used daily in our lab. ELN has never caused anyone to lose any data or notes. To the contrary, since most people type faster than they can write by hand, ELN has helped people take more detailed notes than they would otherwise have. One of my postdocs has collected 2,500 pages of notes and graphs within two years of switching to ELN!

ELN is free and open source and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux:

• Latest version for Ubuntu Linux: eln_1.2.12-1_amd64.deb (tested on Ubuntu 17.10)
• Latest version for Mac: eln-1.2.12.1-mac.dmg (tested on Mac OS High Sierra)
• Latest version for Windows: eln-1.2.12-x86-setup.exe (tested on Windows 10)
• Latest version of the user guide: eln-userguide.pdf
• Source downloads are available at GitHub.

Development of ELN is ongoing. Your suggestions, bug reports, and code contributions are welcome. Please contact the author: daw@caltech.edu.