How to write a narrative CV

Dr. Editor’s answer:

Because it’s always nice to see an example before you write in a new genre, now’s a great time to ask your colleagues in the U.K. and Ireland if they’d be willing to share with you their “Résumé for Researchers,” which they’ve used for Royal Society and Science Foundation Ireland grants for a few years now. You could also ask a U.S.-based colleague to share with you their NIH Biosketch Supplement, but keep in mind that the NIH is implementing changes in 2025, too, which means a lot of norms are in flux. Guidance (from NIH) and templates (from the Royal Society) may also be helpful when you’re ready to begin drafting your narrative CV.

In the Canadian context, the best comparable we have to a narrative CV is the “most significant contributions” module that will be familiar to folks who’ve applied to the NSERC Discovery, SSHRC Insight and CIHR Project competitions. While the details of CIHR’s narrative CV aren’t yet finalized — we’ll know more in July, when they launch the fall 2025 competition — we can anticipate that it’ll probably be five pages long (six in French), require a discussion of both research contributions and contributions to training and have some kind of personal statement. Let’s consider these three sections in turn:

1. Research contributions

I expect you’ll be asked to list up to five contributions and that most folks will list between three and five, depending on how much detail they want to provide for each. If your methodology requires substantial time cultivating relationships with communities, government officials or staff at not-for-profit or for-profit organizations, it’s appropriate to emphasize that labour in this section of your CV.

Some researchers think of a “contribution” as a particular publication; others think of it as a project; still others think of it as an outcome. I can see any of these approaches being appropriate though I admit a preference for focusing on outcomes. However a contribution is conceived of, I like the researchers I support to refer to completed work that has had some kind of scholarly, social, cultural, environmental or economic impact.

I wouldn’t suggest listing successful grants here, because a grant isn’t a contribution in and of itself — a grant is just the start of a project. Having said that, if you start seeing other folks writing things like, “I have a career total of $X in external grant funding ($Y as principal investigator),” then such a line may become a norm and you might want to start adding that line in too.

For each contribution, write a short description, between about 120 and 220 words. Half of this description should outline the content of your contribution — your topic, your findings, the fresh angle you took, the work’s novelty or innovation or importance to people or society or the environment or ongoing scholarly conversations.

The second half of this description should describe the impact that your work had on others. Because impact can mean different things to different people, let’s think through what this looks like in practice.

• If you think of your five most significant contributions as five publications, then, in that second half of your description, you might point to the fact that this particular paper was first presented at an international conference with an X per cent acceptance rate and then published in the most important journal for environmental health researchers. Maybe your paper won an award; maybe the journal in which you published it ranked it as one of the most cited of the past year; maybe it (and the companion piece you wrote for The Conversation Canada) generated media interviews; maybe you looked yourself up in Sage PolicyProfiles or WorldCat and so you can enumerate the countries and contexts in which your work is now circulating. Tell us about it.

• If you think of your contribution as a project — a multi-year initiative; a substantial strand within your program of research — then its impact might be described as above, with the addition of the number and quality of associated articles published, conference presentations delivered and other measures similar to those of individual publications.

• If you think of your contribution as an outcome — a change in the world; a benefit that others have reaped — then you can describe the labour that you put into bringing about that outcome and some evidence of the change you made. You can list associated publications and conference presentations as well as less conventional consequences of your work: maybe your findings were cited in best practice guidance published by a national professional organization, which shows that your work is making it into clinical practice; maybe you’ve delivered invited presentations or training for practitioners; maybe your ideas spun off into a special issue of a journal, a half-day workshop at an international conference or an industry application.

To be clear: some of the suggestions I’ve provided here don’t move too far away from conventional measures of scholarly impact like JIF and H-index which, as I’ve discussed previously, are inaccurate proxies of quality, and which run counter to the whole point of the narrative CV (e.g., Bordignon et al. 2023). In the short term — until reviewers are accustomed to looking at narrative CVs — I’m going to suggest that you include these kinds of numbers alongside unconventional or qualitative descriptions of impact. That’s my belief in academia’s conservativism coming to the fore. I advise conforming to existing norms in this document: while the form is shifting soon, it’ll take more time for the norms to follow.

Having said that, you don’t have to follow the norms if they don’t fit your work. One of my favourite examples of a research contribution is one that I saw recently, in which a person of colour — you know, the kind of researcher who’s expected to perform labour that isn’t recognized as high-value (Brissett, 2020; Guillaume & Apodaca, 2019; Matthew, 2016; Smith et al. 2020) — described the service they performed for a professional organization as indicative of their ability to build their reputation among practitioners  and so paved the way for effective knowledge translation in the future. They framed their high levels of outreach and community engagement as part of what makes them a great researcher, one with a high potential for substantial impact, and it was a compelling move. In short: if it’s appropriate for you to deviate from the above recommendations for one (or more) of your research contributions, please do so.

2. Training and mentorship

In this section, I recommend first describing the context in which you provide research training — are you at a research-intensive institution, a comprehensive university, or a primarily undergraduate institution? Does your program have ready access to graduate students in research programs? How much teaching is required in your role? Do you regularly train practitioners as a part of their continuing professional development?

Once you’ve briefly described your context, then outline your experience providing training and mentorship. I like to see a mix of numbers, outcomes, training strategies and attention to underrepresented trainees:

• For numbers, you can mention the number of undergraduate and graduate RAs you’ve supervised; the number of TAs supervised; the number of master’s and doctoral trainees whose dissertations or capstone projects you’ve supervised; or the number of Mitacs interns you’ve supervised, if relevant.

• For outcomes, in addition to mentioning awards, scholarships or fellowships won by your supervisees, I also like to see career outcomes. How many of your former trainees have gone on to pursue graduate studies, obtained tenure-track positions or found relevant and meaningful work in the world outside of academia? Can you name-drop a few employers of your former trainees?

• Some mention of training strategies is nice to have, if you have the space. For example, maybe you facilitate a monthly journal-reading club or work-in-progress sessions; maybe your approach is asset-based; maybe there’s a particular skillset or method that you’re particularly strong at cultivating because you use a particular tool or software or approach.

• Finally, I expect it’ll be useful to mention your ability to cultivate an inclusive, welcoming environment for trainees who come from underrepresented groups. Do you know which populations or demographic groups are underrepresented in your discipline? Could you find some published research in this area? Once you know who is underrepresented, describe the day-to-day practices you use to support equity and foster inclusion among your team. The more peer reviewers become accustomed to reading about equity, diversity and inclusion in research design and training, the less “I have my trainees complete our institution’s EDI training” will suffice for this section.

If you provide substantial mentorship to students, postdoctoral fellows or early-career colleagues, it’s totally appropriate to mention that labour here as well. If you provide care-related work within your faculty role — for undergraduates in office hours, for example, or for junior colleagues — I’d love to see you bring in that often-invisible labour, if you feel that doing so will be well-received in your discipline.

If you hold a particular title related to your mentorship work — for instance, if your role as undergraduate chair necessitates that you mentor new adjuncts — then bring that in too.

3. Personal statement

The personal statement, in my opinion, should be exceptionally brief and not too personal. If you’re early in your career, you might briefly mention particular specialized training that you received as a graduate student or postdoc; if that training is more than five years in the past or not particularly well-known, I’d leave it off.

In many disciplines, it’ll also be conventional that you describe your positionality here; some resources to support you in articulating your positionality include Britto (2023), Holmes (2020) and Queen’s CTL (n.d.).Queen’s CTL n.d.

In this section, you might briefly mention administrative or leadership roles you’ve held, or the impact on your publication record of COVID-19, caregiving responsibilities or medical or parental leaves. Personally, I align with Mollie Etheridge et al. (2024) who are skeptical of the narrative CV’s power to counter the cultural force of “care obfuscations” in academia:

the extent to which this approach will be successful is uncertain given that applicants have little indication – or reassurance – as to how care-giving experiences would be assessed should they disclose them. There is also little assurance that evaluators have been sufficiently trained to recognise, and then mitigate, the effect of their biases on the evaluation process [… especially in the contemporary context of a] cut-throat, metrics-based evaluation system that cast[s] care-confessions and experiences as distractions from the performative point.

To put it another way: it’s illegal for an interviewer to ask a prospective employee if they have or want children, and so I’m not sure it’s (yet) a good idea for researchers to self-disclose caregiving responsibilities in their grant applications. Doing so remains, unfortunately, still a high-risk move.

For at least the first year of CIHR Project Grant applications, then, I’ll be keeping the personal statement to a third of a page or less and I’ll be editing out details about the reason for any leaves my clients have taken.

Writing a compelling narrative CV is an argument for your capability and for the feasibility of your proposed work. It’s a chance for researchers to begin to bring about a world in which currently invisible labour can be seen, normalized, even valued. But it’s also a tightrope on which you’ll need to dance. If you have time before the next semester starts, I suggest getting some ideas on paper for these three sections so you’re not panicking come the fall application season.