Taking extensive notes during your research is absolutely crucial. Only with in-depth notes can you later translate the results of your project into coherent explanations of your approach and fndings, and reliably condense them into knowledge. At least the following components of your work should easily be covered by the notes you are taking:

• commenting code (to make your scripts and algorithms understandable to your colleagues and your future self )
• documenting simulations (to track which variations of a computer experiments you have attempted, and how you created the data that you are using; essential to plan future simulations, and to write papers and your dissertation about your data)
• documenting daily / weekly activities and progress (to facilitate progress tracking and assure yourself that you have done your work, even if not all your approaches and attempts will be successful; also helps with improving your intuition of how long certain tasks take, for time and project management purposes)

The technical approach to your note taking is mostly up to you. The most important aspects of choosing the tools with which you document your work are how eeffectively they serve their purpose and how efficiently you can use them. The most ingenious application or technology does not serve its purpose if your activation barrier to employing it is too high, due to specific shortcomings of the tool or due to your personal preferences or predispositions. The simplest approach can serve all your needs, if applied with purpose.

Possible note taking approaches rely on, for example:

• paper notebooks
• *.txt- files (commonly named README for code/project documentation)
• Microsoft OneNote, powerpoint slides

Keep in mind that your notes can and should also serve other group members: as an introduction into your research, if they are more junior and starting a new project, or if they want to reuse your data, or if they simply need to perform logistical or administrative steps that have become trivial to you after having done them several times. If you get the chance to document any procedures that you remember having to learn or that you see others struggle with in the group, please seize the moment and make this lab manual/wiki more comprehensive by contributing a “how-to”-page or adding links or resources.

Here is a publication on a computational lab book.

Utilize this wiki for documenting your general knowledge and share it with the group. How-to's (install, usage ,code,..) and quick-starts are highly appreciated! If you find mistakes (spelling,content,etc) or outdated info, please edit and correct it! Writing is a skill which needs extensive practice and will improve over time. Consider writing wiki articles to be practice towards improving your skills, so that writing your first paper will be easier.

In general, the syntax is pretty simple, see here. If you are not sure how to format a certain thing, put it in as plain text first, we can always improve.

LaTeX style equations work, using the MatJax plugin. Inline math between dollar-signs,$a+b=c$ will turn into: $a+b=c$ or write separate blocks:

\begin{align*}
e^x & = 1 + x + \frac{x^2}{2} + \frac{x^3}{6} + \cdots \\
  & = \sum_{n\geq 0} \frac{x^n}{n!}
\end{align*}

which turns into: \begin{align*} e^x & = 1 + x + \frac{x^2}{2} + \frac{x^3}{6} + \cdots \\ & = \sum_{n\geq 0} \frac{x^n}{n!} \end{align*}