  The use of lab notebooks for scientific documentation is a ubiquitous part of
physics research. However, it is common for undergraduate physics laboratory
courses not to emphasize the development of documentation skills, despite the
fact that such courses are some of the earliest opportunities for students to
start engaging in this practice. One potential impediment to the inclusion of
explicit documentation training is that it may be unclear to instructors which
features of authentic documentation practice are efficacious to teach and how
to incorporate these features into the lab class environment. In this work, we
outline some of the salient features of authentic documentation, informed by
interviews with physics researchers, and provide recommendations for how these
can be incorporated into the lab curriculum. We do not focus on structural
details or templates for notebooks. Instead, we address holistic considerations
for the purpose of scientific documentation that can guide students to develop
their own documentation style. Taking into consideration all the aspects that
can help improve students' documentation, it is also important to consider the
design of the lab activities themselves. Students should have experience with
implementing these authentic features of documentation during lab activities in
order for them to find practice with documentation beneficial.
