Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A funding panel's guidance instructs reviewers to weigh productivity relative to a documented career break, rather than against an unbroken full-time baseline.
- Is an instance
A CV template includes an explicit prompt for applicants to describe non-traditional outputs or contextual factors, so career-diverse paths are visible to reviewers rather than silently penalised.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A promotion criterion phrased as a fixed number of years since PhD, with no adjustment for part-time status or career breaks, does not accommodate career diversity.
Editorial commentary
Career diversity acknowledges that researchers contribute through varied routes: industry-to-academia or academia-to-policy moves, parental and caring-responsibility breaks, part-time research, late-career entry, multiple discipline shifts, and international mobility. Traditional CVs and metric-driven assessment tend to penalise these non-linear paths, because productivity is implicitly measured against a full-time, uninterrupted, single-institution baseline that a career-diverse researcher’s record will not match, regardless of the quality of their actual contributions.
Where it is written into assessment frameworks
Career-diversity recognition is explicitly called for in the Hong Kong Principles (Principle 5, on rewarding the practices of good research over a simple metric-based record) and in CoARA‘s Agreement, whose commitments on evaluating diverse career paths and contributions push signatories away from productivity measures that assume continuous, full-time employment. It also intersects directly with the Leiden Manifesto‘s Principle 7, that individual researchers should be assessed through qualitative judgement of their portfolio rather than an indicator alone — career context is exactly the kind of information a bare bibliometric indicator cannot carry.
Practical implementation
Turning the principle into practice requires concrete mechanisms, not just a policy statement: explicit prompts within CV templates and grant-application forms for applicants to describe career context and non-traditional outputs (the personal statement is the most common such mechanism); documented equivalences that let reviewers weigh, for example, a part-time researcher’s output against a pro-rated rather than absolute baseline; and reviewer training or guidance that makes explicit how much weight career context should carry, since without that guidance individual reviewers vary widely in whether and how they factor it in.
References
- Hong Kong Principles, Moher et al., 2020. League of European Research Universities advice paper on intersectoral mobility. CoARA Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, 2022.
Also known as
Career-path diversity · Diverse research careers
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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