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.

Workflow is a big task that these programs are expected to take care of. There is also an incredible amount of data that goes into them which is used in a number of different ways. Depending on the type of lab, there are many other tasks that software like this might be used for.

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.

If someone asks four scientists what they consider an information system for laboratories to be, they're likely to get four different answers. This is because a person's definition may vary depending on what kind of science they are in. Knowing what a scientist really means is important.

There are a number of different categories that these systems are put in, but it is easy to see that the main purposes remain the same across all of them. The specific needs of some labs have led to some that have special tools to look at commercial and research aspects. Others are mainly for the clinical and forensic side of things.

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.

Entering information manually can often seem like a hassle, but it is hard for the average person to even imagine how difficult it was in laboratories before this automated software existed. Beyond just plain annoying to have to do (and a literal pain for those scientists whose hands cramped up from how much writing they had to do on a daily basis), it also endangered the success of studies because of simple transcription errors. It is much harder to have incorrectly recorded data with this kind of a system.