Research groups consist of people from many different backgrounds and therefore each individual has a unique personality and ideas. Harnessing this diversity is essential for the progress of science but optimizing success for each unique individual within a team can be difficult to manage. We, a group of eLife Community Ambassadors from the Intersectionality Initiative (2019-2020) have compiled a lab manual template to help enhance communication between lab members and promote success of individuals and the lab. Lab manuals are an excellent way of outlining expectations and promoting inclusivity within a lab. They can also be a helpful resource and a prompt for important but difficult conversations that are often avoided. We hope you will find this template useful in creating your own lab manual, whether that be for your own lab or one you work in. Please use, share, and modify the template and send us your feedback.
We provide a template for a lab expectations document, or lab manual, to assist with inclusive practices in academic science labs. We provide text files on our osf project page and we also provide the lab manual in wiki form within this osf wiki for fork, modification, and reuse.
Please feel free to fork, use, share, and modify this lab manual template! We would like to get feedback on this lab manual to improve our document. Please help us by taking this short (anonymous) survey.
- Sarah Hainer
- Nick Leigh
- Emily Furlong
- Ashley Albright
- Pawel Grzechnik
- Sarvenaz Sarabipour
- Charlotte (Lotte) de Winde
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License – please attribute to ‘eLife Community Ambassadors Intersectionality Initiative 2019-2020’
We would like to thank eLife Community staff for their support, and the eLife Community Ambassadors who have translated the guidelines: Humberto Debat (Spanish) and Melanie Krause (German). Images (except for Intersectionality logo) created with Biorender.com.