Dictionary domainTrack A
Mentorship, training, and career stages
Career-stage terms underpinning narrative CVs and mentorship recognition.
For implementers
Operational deployment checklist for Mentorship, training, and career stages: prerequisites, five deploy steps, integration notes for Pure, Symplectic Elements, Worktribe, DSpace, and more, plus the pitfalls that recur in the field.
Terms in this domain
27 terms
Mentoring agreement
A documented (often written) understanding between mentor and mentee setting out the goals, frequency of meetings, mode of communication, scope of mentoring, expectations on both parties, confidentiality boundaries, and review schedule for the relationship.
Sponsorship relationship
A career-development relationship in which a senior researcher (sponsor) uses their social and political capital actively on behalf of a more junior researcher's career advancement — through nomination, recommendation, public advocacy, or introductions — going beyond the advisory dyad of mentorship.
Two-page narrative
A common page-limited narrative-CV format in which a researcher describes their contributions to research, people, and the wider community within a strict two-page limit, used in UKRI R4RI and several European national funder applications.
Diversity statement
A document — typically 1-2 pages — in which a researcher articulates their contributions to and plans for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in research and teaching, increasingly required in US faculty job applications and some research-funding contexts.
Teaching statement
A document — typically 1-3 pages — in which a researcher articulates their philosophy of teaching, summary of teaching experience and approach, and evidence of teaching effectiveness, used in academic job applications and tenure cases.
Research statement
A document — typically 2-5 pages — in which a researcher describes their research programme: past contributions, current projects, and planned trajectory, written for academic job applications, fellowship applications, or research-evaluation exercises.
Personal statement
A short narrative section in a researcher's CV, biosketch, or grant application in which the researcher articulates in their own voice why they are qualified to undertake the proposed work, their career trajectory, and any contextual factors relevant to the assessment.
Biosketch
A short, structured biographical document used in US federal research grant applications (most notably NIH and NSF) summarising a researcher's qualifications, positions, contributions, and a curated subset of their outputs, in a tightly page-limited format.
Narrative CV
A researcher curriculum vitae format that uses prose narrative descriptions of contributions, career trajectory, and impact in place of (or alongside) traditional structured lists of publications, grants, and metrics, intended to give context to outputs and recognise broader research contributions.
Resume for Researchers (R4RI)
A structured narrative-CV format developed by the Royal Society (UK) which asks researchers to describe their contributions under four headings: contributions to knowledge generation; contributions to development of individuals; contributions to the wider research community; and contributions to broader society.
Career interruption
A near-synonym of career break used by some funders (notably the Royal Society and ERC) to denote a period of reduced or absent research activity due to defined personal circumstances; sometimes also used to include reduced-fraction working (less than full-time) rather than complete absence.
Career break
A documented absence from active research work of at least three months' duration arising from parental leave, caring responsibilities, illness, disability, military service, or other personal circumstances, recognised by funders as extending early-career-researcher eligibility windows pro-rata.
Supervisor (doctoral)
The academic appointed by an institution to guide a doctoral candidate's research, with formal responsibility for the academic quality of supervision, progress monitoring, ethical conduct of the research, and recommendation for examination, in accordance with the institution's doctoral regulations.
Sponsor (career)
A senior researcher or leader who actively advocates for a more junior researcher's career advancement — nominating them for opportunities, opening doors, vouching for them in evaluations — distinct from a mentor (who advises) by the action of using social and political capital on the mentee's behalf.
Mentee
A researcher (typically more junior) who receives career, intellectual, or professional guidance from a mentor in a defined or recognised mentoring relationship, distinct from a supervisee in that the relationship lacks formal evaluative authority.
Mentor
An experienced researcher who provides career, intellectual, or professional guidance to a less experienced researcher (the mentee), distinct from a formal supervisor in that the mentoring relationship is typically chosen rather than assigned, may cross institutional lines, and does not carry formal evaluative authority.
Co-investigator
A named investigator on a research grant, contract, or protocol other than the lead PI, who contributes substantive scientific expertise and shares responsibility for portions of the work, typically with a defined role in the proposal and a named budget allocation.
Principal investigator (PI)
The named individual on a research grant, contract, or protocol who is formally accountable for the scientific direction, ethical conduct, financial stewardship, and reporting of the research, typically holding a continuing academic or research-leader position at the host institution.
Research associate
A staff researcher (often post-doctoral, sometimes post-master's) employed in a role with substantive scientific contribution and a degree of intellectual independence, typically more senior than a research assistant but not yet an independent principal investigator.
Research assistant
A staff member employed to provide research support — data collection, literature search, analysis, administration — to a research project under the direction of a more senior researcher, typically without independent design authority over the project.
Master’s-level researcher
A researcher whose highest qualification is a master's degree (MSc, MA, MRes, MPhil, etc.) engaged in research work in a role appropriate to that qualification, distinct from doctoral candidates and from those with bachelor's-only qualifications.
Pre-doctoral researcher
A researcher engaged in research work prior to commencing a doctoral programme, typically in roles such as research assistant, lab technician, or research associate at the master's-equivalent level, where the position involves substantive research rather than only support tasks.
Doctoral candidate
A student enrolled in a doctoral degree programme (PhD, DPhil, EdD, EngD, MD, etc.) who is undertaking original research toward a thesis or equivalent capstone, under the supervision of one or more academic supervisors.
Post-doctoral researcher
A researcher who has been awarded a doctoral degree and is engaged in a temporary, fixed-term position primarily devoted to research, typically under the supervision of a principal investigator, with the intention of further developing as an independent researcher.
Senior researcher
A researcher at an advanced career stage (typically 15+ years post-PhD) with a sustained record of independent research leadership, mentoring of multiple researchers to independence, substantial competitive funding history, and recognised disciplinary contribution.
Mid-career researcher
A researcher beyond the early-career window but not yet at senior leadership status — typically 8-20 years post-PhD with an established independent research programme, lab or group, and a track record of competitive funding and mentoring.
Early-career researcher (ECR)
A researcher within a defined number of years (typically 5-8) of their first doctoral degree, or — for researchers without a doctorate — within an equivalent period of full-time research practice, accounting for career breaks and part-time work.
