nanalLabs BlogSearch "lost research notebook" (연구노트 분실) in Korean and you'll mostly find a single loss-report form from a university's industry-academic cooperation foundation. Filing the form isn't the end of it. What matters far more, when a notebook is lost or damaged mid-project on a government-funded R&D project, is what you do next, in what order — because that's what decides whether the outcome is read as a defensible "failure to perform" rather than misconduct.
Why this is serious — your entire burden of proof disappears at once
Under Korea's National R&D Innovation Act, Article 35 and Article 65 of its Enforcement Decree require researchers and R&D institutions to record and manage how the research was actually carried out. The research notebook is the physical evidence of that duty. Losing or damaging it means that evidence disappears entirely, and there's no other way to show, during an interim or final evaluation or a misconduct inquiry, that the research was actually carried out in good faith. Cases exist where notebook damage or loss led to a finding of bad- faith performance and clawback of government funding plus a ban on future participation. Exact standards vary by program, ministry, and institution — always check your own institution's rules and the terms of your grant agreement.
Four steps to take right now
- Report immediately — notify your industry-academic cooperation
foundation (or research support office) on the day you discover the loss or damage. A delayed report is itself read as evidence of negligent management.
- Write an incident report — document when and how it was lost or
damaged, and what research content had been recorded up to that point. Attach circumstantial evidence: emails, conversations with co- researchers, intermediate outputs.
- Reconstruct a replacement notebook — get a new notebook issued and
rewrite, as faithfully as memory and the circumstantial evidence allow, the research content up to the point of loss. Mark the reconstruction date clearly so it's distinguishable from the original.
- Tighten management going forward — after reconstruction, keep the
notebook especially diligently, on whatever cadence the guideline requires. Evaluators weigh post-incident management more heavily than the incident itself.
Of the four, the one most often skipped in practice is step 2. Plenty of incident reports say only "the notebook was lost" and stop there — and an incident report with no supporting evidence carries little weight on its own. Attach anything that's independently timestamped: instrument logs, purchase records for samples and reagents, emails or chat logs with co-researchers, draft interim reports. These are what actually establish "research was genuinely underway up to this point."
What separates a defensible failure from misconduct
The same "notebook problem" can land very differently. A project where none of the participating researchers kept a notebook at all tends to be found in bad faith. By contrast, cases exist where a notebook was damaged or lost, but the incident was clearly explained, reconstruction was backed by circumstantial evidence, and management afterward was diligent — and those were accepted as a good-faith failure. What evaluators are actually looking at isn't "did an incident happen," but "did the researcher work to rebuild the burden of proof afterward." Program-specific standards vary here too, so check your own institution's guideline in the original.
Paper vs. electronic — recoverability is not the same
| Paper notebook | Electronic notebook | |
|---|---|---|
| Recovering the original after loss | Effectively impossible | Possible if the service keeps backups |
| Partial recovery after damage | Only the surviving pages | Sometimes recoverable to a pre-damage version |
| Evidence for the recovery | Relies entirely on circumstantial evidence | Edit/access history is preserved alongside it |
| Risk if the service shuts down | N/A | Real — needs periodic offline backups |
An electronic notebook isn't automatically safe. If the service shuts down and you haven't backed anything up yourself, unbacked records can be just as hard to recover as a lost paper notebook. Regardless of the tool, the same principle holds — never keep the original in only one place.
Preventing a repeat: redundancy is the core of it
What comes up again and again in loss/damage cases is that recoverability after the fact, not the incident itself, is what decides the evaluation — and recoverability comes down to how many places the original existed in, and in what form. For paper notebooks, scan them regularly and keep the scans somewhere separate. For electronic notebooks, don't rely solely on the service's internal backup — download your records periodically and keep a second copy in a separate location. That redundancy is the single biggest factor in being recognized as a good-faith failure if an incident does happen.