How to Keep a Research Journal

Six months from now you won't remember why you dropped that variable or changed your sampling. Your research journal will.

A research journal is a dated, running record of your project: what you did, what you decided, and why. It's different from a lab notebook, which records procedures and results. The journal records your thinking.

Research journal vs lab notebook

• Lab notebook: protocols, measurements, results. Often formal and sometimes required.
• Research journal: reasoning, doubts, decisions, ideas, and how the work is going for you.

Many researchers keep both. If your field has no lab notebook, the journal becomes your main record of how the project evolved.

What to write

Decisions and the reasons behind them

"Switched from interviews to a survey because recruitment stalled at six participants." Decisions like this are exactly what examiners ask about, and the reasoning is the first thing you forget.

Dead ends

Write down approaches that didn't work and why. It stops you repeating them, and it is useful material for the limitations section of your thesis.

Ideas you aren't ready to act on

A half-formed idea written down today can become a chapter later. If it stays in your head, it is usually gone by next week.

Reading reactions

After a paper, write two or three lines on what it changes for your project. These notes make your literature review far easier to draft than a pile of highlighted PDFs.

How you're doing

Research is long and often isolating. A line about your energy and mood each time helps you notice when you're stuck or burning out, before it becomes a crisis.

How often to write

Aim for a short entry on every day you work on the project, even if it's just "read two papers, nothing new". Regular small entries beat occasional long ones, because the point is the record over time.

A simple entry structure

• Today I: what you actually did.
• I decided: any decision, with the reason.
• I'm unsure about: open questions.
• Next: the next concrete step.
• Tags: chapter, method, or theme, like #methods or #chapter-2.

Two example entries

#methods #chapter-3. Today I: coded interviews 6 and 7. I decided: merge "time pressure" and "workload" into one code, because participants use the words interchangeably. I'm unsure about: whether that hides a difference between students and staff. Next: check the staff interviews for the distinction before Friday.

#literature. Today I: read a 2021 paper on survey fatigue. Reaction: their response-rate drop matches what I saw in my pilot; could justify the shorter questionnaire. Unsure: their sample was all undergraduates. Next: look for a postgraduate study before citing it as support.

Neither entry took more than five minutes, and both answer a question a supervisor or examiner is likely to ask months later: why did you do it that way?

Weekly and monthly reviews

Once a week, read back your entries and write a short summary: what moved forward, what's blocked, and what you decided. Once a month, read the weekly summaries. This is where the research journal earns its keep: patterns appear, such as a method that keeps causing problems or a theme that keeps resurfacing in your reading.

Before a supervisor meeting

Spend ten minutes with your journal the day before and write one entry with three headings:

• Since we last met: two or three lines of progress.
• Decisions I'd like you to check: pulled straight from your "I decided" lines.
• Where I'm stuck: pulled from your "I'm unsure about" lines.

After the meeting, add what was agreed. Next time, you start from a written record instead of memory.

A reflexive journal for qualitative research

In qualitative research, a research journal often doubles as a reflexive journal: a record of how your own background, assumptions and reactions might shape what you notice and how you interpret it. After an interview or a coding session, add a line or two on questions like "What surprised me?" and "What did I expect to hear, and did that affect my questions?" Many methods chapters draw on exactly these notes when discussing reflexivity.

Keep sensitive data out of it

Your journal is about your thinking, not your raw data. Don't paste participant names, contact details, transcripts or anything your ethics approval says must stay in specific storage. Refer to participants by the codes you use in your project ("P07"), and keep the data itself where your institution requires.

Common mistakes

• Only writing when something big happens. The small daily decisions are the ones you'll forget.
• Leaving out the reasons. "Dropped question 12" is useless later; "dropped question 12 because three pilot participants misread it" is gold.
• Deleting dead ends. Failed approaches are part of the story and often belong in your limitations section.
• Writing for an audience. Nobody else needs to read it, so you can be honest about doubts.

How it pays off

• Supervisor meetings: scan the last two weeks of entries and you have your agenda.
• Methods chapter: your decisions and reasons are already written down, in order.
• Viva or defence: you can explain why you did things, not just what you did.
• Your wellbeing: you can see progress on weeks when it feels like there is none.

Choosing where to keep it

Your journal will hold unpublished ideas and honest doubts, so privacy matters. It also needs to be there when you are: in the archive, the field, or on a train. Look for something private by default, organised by tags, that works offline and lets you export everything. Ediary does all of that for free, and our security page explains exactly how entries are protected.