I like the idea, but who the hell is ever going to go through all of that? Yes, you made some checklist, great. But no other lab is going to go through all of that. And in your field, if you are very lucky, you may have just 1 other lab doing anything like what you are doing. It would be a checklist just for yourself/lab, so why bother recording any of it? Yes, do it, fine, but how long should you store those records that will never be seen, even by yourself? Why in god's name would you waste those hours/days just going over recordings of you watching a mouse/cell/thingy to make sure of some uncountable number of little things did/did not happen? If you need that level of detail, then you designed your experiment wrong and the results are just going to swamped in noise anyway. You are trying, then, to fish out significant results from your data, the exact wrong way to run an experiment. Just design a better trial, there is no need to generate even more confusing data that has a 1/20 chance of being significant.
The checklist is not required to be on such level of detail. It just has to exist and it has to be generic enough. It's interesting to see here example with fire alarm: to me existence of such factors is the smoking gun of potential improvements to the experimental environment. Why not excluding ALL stress factors by designing something like sound-proof cage? Needs extra budget? Probably, but how about some another unaccounted noise that will ruin the experiment? This gives us an idea of better checklist: ensure that experiment provides stressless environment by eliminating sound, vibration, smells etc.
> who the hell is ever going to go through all of that?
It's not particularly onerous, considering the sorts of things many scientists already go through, e.g. regarding contamination, safety, reducing error, etc.
> Yes, you made some checklist, great. But no other lab is going to go through all of that. And in your field, if you are very lucky, you may have just 1 other lab doing anything like what you are doing. It would be a checklist just for yourself/lab, so why bother recording any of it?
Why bother writing any methods section? Why bother writing in lab books? I wasn't suggesting "do all of these things"; rather "these are factors which could influence the result; try controlling them if possible".
> Yes, do it, fine, but how long should you store those records that will never be seen, even by yourself?
They would be part of the published scientific record, with a DOI cited by the subsequent papers; presumably stored in the same archive as the data, and hence subject to the same storage practices. That's assuming your data is already being published to repositories for long-term archive; if not, that's a more glaring problem to fix first, not least because some funding agencies are starting to require it.
> Why in god's name would you waste those hours/days just going over recordings of you watching a mouse/cell/thingy to make sure of some uncountable number of little things did/did not happen?
I don't know what you mean by this. A checklist is something to follow as you're performing the steps. If it's being filled in afterwards, there should be a "don't know" option (which I indicated with "?") for when the answers aren't to hand.
