Knowledge Base Wiki

Welcome to LIMSwiki.org, the laboratory, health, and science informatics encyclopedia and knowledge repository.

Users have contributed: 3,164 articles.

LIMSwiki is a MediaWiki-based platform dedicated to the scientific community, featuring organized, cited, up-to-date content regarding all aspects of laboratory informatics, bioinformatics, health informatics, and other types of informatics, as well as other technological, regulatory, and standardization topics relating to the laboratory. LIMSwiki also strives to maintain relevant knowledge about a variety of laboratory systems, including commercial and open-source software likely to be used in a laboratory setting. This includes many of the known vendors of such software.

Get started

Need help getting started with LIMSwiki? Have no fear! Here are some excellent starting points:

LIMSwiki and MediaWiki help:

Guides, white papers, and more

A LIMSwiki guide or white paper is a topical, cited work researched, written, and edited to meet a certain standard of rigor. The topics of these guides and white papers have been chosen over the years to address both contemporary and long-time themes in laboratory and scientific informatics, as well as technologically adjacent themes like cloud computing and cybersecurity. (Note that in the LII: namespace where these are found, once can also find other "launch" pages for material such as recorded webinars, EdX courses, and other industry works.)

Browse all 44 LIMSwiki guides and white papers.

LIMS Q&A articles

A LIMSwiki Q&A article is a brief topical article that is researched, written, and edited to answer a specific question, with necessary citations. The questions asked in these articles usually relate to specific industries that depend on laboratories, the laboratory informatics applications used in those industries, or some other laboratory/informatics-adjacent topic such as ISO/IEC 17025. A loose limit of 1,200 to 1,400 words is strived for, but sometimes they may go significantly longer in order to best answer the question.

Browse all 34 LIMSwiki Q&A articles.

Journal articles

A LIMSwiki journal article is a selected open-access article relating to various fields of informatics, laboratory management, and data management, free to republish elsewhere with proper citation. You can browse the collection using the tools below. (For a full listing of journals—open-access and otherwise—relating to laboratory informatics, bioinformatics, and other forms of informatics, please see LIMSWiki:Resources/Journals.)

Browse all 460 journal articles.

All 59 journal articles about laboratory informatics · All 101 journal articles about health informatics

Books

A LIMSwiki book is a special rendered collection of articles across various namespaces in LIMSwiki. It may come in the form of a curated list of encyclopedic articles on a given topic, a special collection of journal articles in the Journal: namespace, or it may be a collection of all the pages of a given white paper or guide in the LII: namespace (which can then be exported to other sites, like LIMSforum).

Browse all 71 LIMSwiki books.

Laboratory informatics software and products

Are you looking for LIMS software? An ELN? Former vendors? Try these suggestions:

Additional tools:

Open-source software

Looking for open-source software solutions to make your lab or office more efficient? Try these starting points:

Additional LIMSwiki resources

We've created several resources for users of the wiki over the years, including the LIMSwiki informatics resource portal, which contains among other tools:

Additional information

June 1, 2024:

It's been a while. How about a few updates? First, today you'll notice a bit of a refresh of the front page. It was becoming increasingly obvious that for a wiki that's been around for well over a decade, finding something across the various namespaces (i.e., areas) still wasn't easy. A plethora of links were pasted across the front page, but that wasn't enough. This front page update is the first of several steps towards making knowledge and information a bit more findable on the wiki (there's always more that can be done). We now have a mini search portal for our four larger non-encyclopedic areas: guides and white papers, Q&A articles, journal articles, and books. This not only highlights these four areas more prominently but also gives users several ways to search and navigate the content in those areas. Second, a difficult decision was made to scale back vendor content. To the point prior about highlighting this wiki's encyclopedic and non-encyclopedic knowledge repository, it was time to move the vendors from the encyclopedic space to their own namespace, the Vendor: namespace. While vendor content is still highly useful to LIMSWiki users, its no longer as front-facing. Additionally, maintaining feature tables for each vendor was increasingly labor-intensive. As such, feature tables were removed, recognizing at the same time the onus remains fully on vendors to be more transparent about making public the full functionality of their offerings so potential buyers can make more informed decisions. Vendor records still retain their history, highlight offerings (i.e., LIMS, LIS, ELN, SDMS, and CDS), industries served, and other original information. Shawn Douglas (talk) 19:06, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

November 20, 2023:

Fig3 Liscouski SciStudGuideLabInfo23.png

Are you studying some sort of laboratory-based science in university? How well do your classes address laboratory informatics topics, particularly in the scope of industrial labs and how they operate outside of academia? If you find the discussion lacking, then his guide by industry veteran Joe Liscouski will be worth a look. In his guide A Science Student's Guide to Laboratory Informatics, Liscouski presents "an annotated map of the laboratory portion of a technological world, identifying critical points of interest and how they relate to one another, while making recommendations for the reader to learn more." Hope you find it useful! Shawn Douglas (talk) 18:48, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

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