How to Invent and Protect Your Invention: A Guide to Patents for Scientists and Engineers

6.1 THE NOTEBOOK

Most importantly, you must document your invention. This means you must record in a notebook your conception, experimentation, and reduction to practice clearly and understandably for those who may examine it. Your notebook should be a diary of your invention in which you record everything that relates to your invention, such as your theories, sketches, experimental facts, observations, comments of others, receipts for purchases, correspondence, conclusions, and so on. However, you should avoid negative comments concerning the project, such as “this experiment did not work,” because they may come back to limit you. You should also avoid comments reflecting the utility or quality of the results of your research. It is preferable to state the data results rather than to draw interpretive conclusions. Photographs, analytical data, and testing results obtained by others should be permanently attached (glued or pasted in your notebook) and their origin referenced. If you need to delete something, do not erase, just cross it out. Do not leave large empty places and do not skip pages.

Under the old first-to-invent system, the notebook was crucial for establishing your date of invention. A notebook is still useful under the first-inventor-to-file system to establish that you are an inventor—that you independently developed the invention rather than deriving it from someone else's work. The notebook may also prove useful in providing supporting documentation for the patent ...