Narrative CVs are gaining in popularity — but many researchers don’t yet know exactly how to craft one.Credit: Getty
A group of funding agencies and research organizations has created a free online platform to help academics to create narrative CVs.
In the past few years, funders have increasingly favoured the narrative style over typical formats, which usually emphasize quantitative indicators. These include the titles of journals that papers are published in, and the amount of grant money received. Narrative CVs describe a person’s contributions and achievements, and reflect a broader range of skills and experiences than do conventional formats.
The Peer Exchange Platform for Narrative-style CVs (PEP-CV) is backed by a coalition of national funders that are already using narrative CVs in funding applications. These include UK Research and Innovation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, Science Foundation Ireland, the Dutch Research Council and the Luxembourg National Research Fund.
Other PEP-CV supporters include London-based research funder Wellcome; the Young Academy of Europe (YAE), a Europe-wide association of junior researchers; and the Marie Curie Alumni Association, an international non-profit organization.
It’s difficult to understand a person’s expertise by looking only at quantitative metrics, says YAE chair Katalin Solymosi, a plant biologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
“If you want to change the research culture, and also build a more inclusive scientific landscape with equity, diversity and inclusion of all talents, there should be greater awareness among funders of more qualitative indicators,” Solymosi says.
Narrative CVs can help funders to see the human being behind a funding application. They can capture periods of parental leave, for example, which are harder to account for in conventional CV formats, she adds.
“But many researchers have no experience with how to write narrative CVs, what to include, and how to avoid it becoming a very lengthy text that nobody will really read,” Solymosi concludes. This is why mentoring support is needed, she says.
A sea change for CVs
Individual researchers can register on PEP-CV as mentors or people seeking advice. Those seeking a mentor can then search for one who best fits their needs. If that person accepts the request, the two are connected through e-mail. Since its launch in March, the platform has garnered around 500 users, 153 mentors and 348 seeking guidance.
Tanita Casci, who directs the research strategy and policy unit at the University of Oxford, UK, says that a mentoring platform such as PEP-CV can help researchers who do not have much local support to find guidance on how to craft their CV.
Because knowledge of this CV format is not yet widespread, she adds, it means that “rather than the narrative CV achieving its intended aims of allowing for greater diversity in applicant pools and awardee pools, it’s actually favouring those who are in institutions that have the appropriate support”.
Future plans include incentivizing mentors to offer their time for free by allowing them to claim recognition using ORCID, a tool that assigns unique identifiers to authors to capture bibliometric outputs. This will enable them to earn credit for their work.
Kelly Cobey, who leads the metascience and open-science programme at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, says a change in behaviour is needed to shift in how research is assessed, and narrative CVs are part of that process.
Currently, grant applicants don’t always know what funders are looking for in narrative CVs, which is why more mentoring support is a positive step, Cobey adds.
In addition to guidance on crafting CVs, Casci thinks institutions should support researchers by making sure they are participating in relevant activities to gain knowledge and experiences that they can eventually write about.
