Sept. 4, 2025,
13:00 –
14:00
Room info:
Library Meetingroom
,
Big Meetingroom
Timetable
Sept. 4, 2025
Lab and field notebooks are essential tools for documenting structured information during measurement campaigns or field and laboratory work. Modern Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) offer advanced features to support this documentation process and can enrich records with additional metadata—such as instrumentation details, personnel involved, sample registration, and more. To fully harness this potential, it is desirable to integrate ELNs seamlessly into the center’s data workflows—supporting information flow from sample and data acquisition, through measurement activities, all the way to data publication in repositories.
However, many laboratories face significant barriers: ELNs are not readily available, may require costly licenses, and often lack institutional support or training opportunities. As a result, their use is not yet widespread.
In this coffee round, we invite participants to explore the potential of ELNs in scientific workflows. Together, we’ll discuss desirable features, briefly review a few existing solutions, and consider whether centrally provided ELN services across Helmholtz could be a sustainable way forward.
Meeting rooms
Library Meetingroom
Big Meetingroom
Modern AI tools for academic literature research can be divided into finders and connectors .
Finders operate in a quite similar way like catalogues: you enter a keyword, a phrase or – even better – a complete question and receive responding matches. Finders work particularly well in the natural sciences, where semantic analyses are less dependent on monographs or older literature sources then in humanities or social sciences. This is due to the fact that finders primarily index and analyse English journal articles with given DOIs and open access status. Connectors , on the other hand, start with a pre-existing literature source, designated as a seed . You enter part of the seed’s metadata (ideally a DOI) into the AI tool to identify further publications. This process automatically identifies literature, which is cited, thematically related or methodologically relevant.
In this Collaboration Coffee session, I will demonstrate how to use both options effectively: The start into a specific research question can be aided by a finder such as Semantic Scholar or Elicit. Based on a selected publication, connector such as ResearchRabbit or Inciteful then help to tap into further literature sources. Alongside my specific examples, I would like to use an …