Safety is a crucial part of any research. Activities looking to understand battery performance are expected to continue well into the future. Maintaining safety during evaluation requires a concerted effort between hands-on researchers, project leads and facility managers. Presented here are a set of recommendations that are aimed to help guide safety during the testing of high energy or high power battery cells that have capacities greater than 1 Ah. This perspective seeks to start the discussion on safe battery evaluation to better protect researchers. (c) The Author(s) 2019. Published by ECS.