Lab notebooks or journals are a must for anyone who works in the lab. Keeping a clear and concise note on the study is extremely important. This documentation isn’t just needed for formality, but it provides you with explanations on certain things. Noting small details and sometimes writing down questions about the research can build up you’re understanding and reasoning later on in the study. For researchers that deal with animals, comparison of data is important, and noting this data for later comparison is pivotal for my study.

This is an interesting topic because many of the devices created in BME Capstone do require a certain level of design control documents. The trouble is the students are somewhat limited in experience so they documents are more simplified, but they do help students get acquainted with the idea of design controls. If the advisor of the team would like the product made by the team to go further and perhaps become a real and marketable product, chances are more work will need to be done, and someone with more professional experience will be needed to get the product off the ground. This is not to say that the device cannot be published by these students, but commercializing the product will require more industry experience.

As far as what I saw in undergraduate, there are two types of review boards departmental review board and university review board. The departmental review board looks after the general procedures of the experiment protocol, and the institutional board mostly looks after the animal and human trials and collaboration rather than the overall experimental procedure. Without the approval of the Departmental board, the institution board does not approve any publication.
Other documents you require in the lab are lab records, experiment procedures backed by literature review and manuals for using machines, protocols for culturing, and chemical datasheets.