Researchers rejoice: the Canadian Common CV’s days are numbered

Researchers applying for grants from Canada’s three main federal funding agencies will soon have cause for celebration: the unpopular Canadian Common CV is being phased out in favour of a new narrative CV.

Rather than a structured database containing all of a researcher’s publications and biographical data, the new CV, called the Tri-Agency CV, is a maximum of five pages (six in French) divided into six sections. They include personal information (such as name and education), a personal statement, a description of up to five significant scientific contributions, a list of up to five additional contributions, a description of supervisory and mentorship activities, and any other relevant information.

Adrian Mota, associate vice-president of research programs at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, said the reason for the new CV format was twofold: to align with the values and goals of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment which the research councils signed in 2019, and to address longstanding complaints from the research community. “The community doesn’t love [the Canadian Common CV], and hasn’t loved it for some time,” he said.

That might be an understatement, based on the opinions of some researchers who have used it.

Nightmare scenario

“Filling it out is a nightmare,” said Michael Hoffman, a computational biologist at the University of Toronto. Every piece of metadata about a publication – journal title, volume, page number and so on – must be entered into separate fields, so the applicant can’t just copy and paste from a publication list. And trying to use the same CV for different grant competitions sometimes generates multiple error messages, forcing researchers to spend hours making small tweaks and changes.

“It never achieved the goal of being one CV for all competitions,” said Jim Woodgett, a senior scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. “Every time, you have to make a competition-specific CV anyway. It’s so frustrating.”

The system also frequently crashes just as grant deadlines are approaching, as scientists across the country race to update their CVs at the same time. “It was a bad implementation of a bad idea,” said Dr. Woodgett.

Read also: The unloved Canadian Common CV is in for an overhaul

The current CV format is not particularly useful for those reviewing grant applications either, said Dr. Hoffman, who has sat on several review panels. “They’ve gone to great lengths to ensure all the metadata about each publication is collected consistently, but that’s not what we need to do effective review,” he said. Long lists of papers don’t help much when the CV does not specify what the applicant’s role was on the project, or which publications are most relevant to the current application, he added: “All you can really assess is quantity.”

Narrative drive

Narrative CVs are becoming more common at research funders around the world. The National Institutes of Health in the U.S. has used a five-page free-form biosketch for years, while many funders in Europe are adopting similar formats. The Resumé for Research and Innovation used by UK Research and Innovation, for example, is limited to four modules over two pages.

Joanna Harrington, a law professor and special adviser to the vice-president of research and innovation at the University of Alberta, said the tri-agencies’ move to a narrative CV format will help get Canadian researchers who are involved in international collaborations more comfortable with the idea. “This is the direction other granting agencies have gone as well,” she said. “So, we’re going to encounter this approach elsewhere.”

Read also: Kill the Canadian Common CV, researchers urge the tri-council

The page limit and focus on aspects other than total publications means that applicants will need to think more carefully about what to include and tailor it to each specific competition. That will inevitably cause some friction, especially among researchers who have been using the current CV for decades and have extensive lists of publications. But the change will help ensure that only the most relevant information, for both applicants and reviewers, is front and centre in the application.

“We believe that a narrative CV best allows people to put their best foot forward to contextualize the research in whatever area they may be working,” said Mr. Mota.

One important difference is the emphasis the narrative CV places on the impact of the researcher’s work, beyond raw publication numbers. It can include things like training future researchers or impacts within a community or on clinical practice.

“For someone who works with Indigenous communities or works in a hospital setting, the goal may not be to publish in Nature,” said Mr. Mota. “It may be to get a policy changed or a process changed. And that’s important in the context of the work that they do.”

For Dr. Harrington, that acceptance of the breadth of possible impacts is a major advantage of narrative CVs. “That’s a highlight of a good model; they’re very inclusive both on different kinds of research and different kinds of outputs, as well as different career paths,” she said.

Positive reception

Some Canadian researchers have already had an opportunity to use the new format. A pilot project testing the new tri-agency CV in some CIHR and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant programs launched last spring. Around 1,000 applicants in three different competitions, including CIHR’s National Women’s Health Research Initiative, have used the new CV through the pilot.

The feedback so far has been largely positive, Mr. Mota said, with a small majority of those who have used the new CV happy with the format, length, and instructions. “There’s some stuff that we need to refine and work on still, of course,” said Mr. Mota. The tri-agencies will continue to listen to feedback and make adjustments as time goes on.

It’s not yet clear when the narrative CV will be rolled out to all grant competitions, said Mr. Mota. It is being developed alongside the new tri-agency Grants Management Solution, known as the TGMS. Work on that has recently started in earnest. It will likely be some time before the largest grant competitions make the switch, such as the CIHR Project Grants, but researchers will slowly begin to use the new format more frequently. “I expect over the next couple years you’ll see this more in our competitions and there’ll be a decision at some point to really escalate our efforts and it will be tied to when we think it’s going to be ready in TGMS,” said Mr. Mota.