Understanding What LIMS Stands For

By Karen Smith


The main thing to understand when learning about this kind of thing is what the letters stand for. LIMS is a laboratory information management system. There are other cases in which it might be called a laboratory information system, abbreviated as LIS, or a laboratory management system, LMS, but they all refer to 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.

Some of the key things that this kind of a system helps in a laboratory is keeping track of all the workflow that goes on in the facility. It is also a way of tracking all of the data that is recorded so that it is easy to access and understand. With the many different kinds of specialty labs that are out there, the uses of these kinds of systems go far beyond these basic examples.

The first systems like these were only for tracking samples because that is all that they were able to do. It is amazing to see how far the software has come, leading to the advanced versions of today. There is an immense amount of data that these systems have to go through in order to do everything that modern lab workers need them to.

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.

When things had to be entered manually in a lab, there were many things that could go wrong. A single error in the transcription of data could be disastrous. This is why having things automatically recorded removes the potential for a huge amount of errors to be made.




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