Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A tenure-track candidate's research statement tracing doctoral work through to a five-year plan of three proposed studies.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
An R4RI submission to a UK funder, structured around four fixed domains for a grant application, is a different document serving a different audience.
Editorial commentary
A research statement is a common requirement in US academic hiring, particularly for tenure-track faculty positions, in which a candidate describes their research program as a coherent narrative rather than as a list. It typically covers: the intellectual thread connecting a candidate’s past work (why these projects, in this order, add up to a program rather than a scattered set of papers); concrete past achievements and their significance; and — usually the section search committees weight most heavily — a forward-looking research agenda describing what the candidate intends to investigate next and, often, what resources (funding, students, lab space) that agenda would require.
It is distinct from a personal statement, which typically justifies a candidate’s fit for a specific opportunity or institution rather than describing the substance of the research itself. It is distinct from a publication list, which is a bibliography, not a narrative. And it predates and is unrelated to the funder-driven narrative-CV movement described under narrative CV: a research statement is written for a hiring or tenure committee evaluating a candidate for a position, not for a funder evaluating a grant application, and it is a forward-looking scholarly-agenda document rather than a backward-looking, domain-structured contribution narrative like R4RI.
How this differs from the related terms on this site
Research statement and teaching statement are a matched pair, both US job-market documents, distinguished from each other by subject (research program vs. teaching philosophy). Both are distinguished from the R4RI/narrative-CV family by context and audience: job-market hiring documents, not funder-assessment narratives.
Example: A tenure-track candidate’s 2-page research statement traces how their doctoral work on a specific mechanism led to their current postdoctoral project and lays out three planned studies for their first five years as an independent investigator.
Counter-example: A candidate’s R4RI submission to a UK funder, describing contributions across four fixed domains for a grant application, is a different document serving a different audience, even though both are sometimes loosely called “narrative” documents.
References
- American Association of University Professors (AAUP) guidance on research statements
- Computing Research Association (CRA) Best Practices Memo on Tenure-Track Hiring
Also known as
Research narrative · Research programme statement
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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