Monday, May 14, 2018

Understanding What LIMS Stands For

By Karen Smith


This is the common abbreviation for what is known in the scientific community as a lab information management system. A LIMS might also be called a lab information system, or a lab management system, abbreviated as LIS and LMS respectively. Although there are some differences between these, they are all basically the same thing.

A person would be hard-pressed to find a lab nowadays that doesn't use one of these systems. There is simply no way to be able to manage all of the data that lab workers have to deal with without a reliable and sophisticated software that was designed for the job. By supporting the many different functions that a lab carries out, software like this makes new methods of experimentation possible, and makes everything in a laboratory much easier.

This kind of system is absolutely necessary just to track a lab's complicated workflow. Every piece of data that gets recorded in a lab is also highly important. Modern scientists will only trust this job to sophisticated software like this.

Management systems have been around in many different forms over the years, but as science has become more advanced, so too have these systems. In the beginning, they were just used to track samples and not much else. Nowadays, the systems are used as highly advanced programs that can put huge amounts of data together at speeds people of yesteryear could only dream of.

Although there is a general consensus on what an information system for a laboratory is, people don't always agree on some of the finer aspects of what defines this type of program. People have to use their own interpretation to see what the definition means to them personally. It is important to know what a certain kind of laboratory defines as an information system as opposed to other kinds.

The different types of information management software sometimes are put into different categories, but all of them have served nearly identical functions over the years. Some systems are used more on the commercial and research side of things. Others are looking more on the forensic and clinical side, making their applications somewhat different.

The way that systems like these have grown and developed reflects the way that the sciences themselves have been growing and developing over the years. One of the big ways that having this kind of software helps the researchers is in providing a way for them to bring together the main different types of science. In so doing, the uses of different types of systems has become more and more similar over the years.

Back in the days when manual data entry was necessary, it was much easier to accidentally record a number wrong or for the records to be compromised than it is today. Removing this potential for error makes a big difference in securing the accurate results of an experiment or research study. It is amazing to think of the amount of money and time that was wasted due to a simple transcription error.




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