A scientific or academic curriculum vitae (CV) is a comprehensive, career-length record of a researcher’s education, positions, funding, publications, teaching, and service. It is the standard document for academic job applications, promotion and tenure dossiers, and — in a funder-specific structured form — grant applications. This guide covers how an academic CV differs from a resume, the sections it conventionally contains, how to list publications honestly and consistently, the current formats major funders require, and how automation and assessment-reform movements are changing what a CV is expected to contain.
CV vs. Resume: Two Documents That Share a Name
Much of the confusion around “CV” comes from the fact that the term means two different things depending on where you are and who is asking for it.
- In the United States, Canada, and most academic contexts worldwide: a CV is a comprehensive, unlimited-length career record. It grows over a career and typically lists every publication, presentation, grant, and teaching assignment. A resume, by contrast, is a targeted one- to two-page summary used for most non-academic job applications. Academics use a CV for academic positions and a resume (or a hybrid “CV-resume”) when applying outside academia.
- In the United Kingdom and much of continental Europe: “CV” is simply the everyday word for what Americans call a resume — a concise one- to two-page document used for essentially all job applications, academic or not. The Europass CV, the European Commission’s standardized template for job-seeker mobility across the EU, is built around this shorter convention: personal information, work experience, education, and skills, kept to roughly two pages.
The practical result: a European researcher applying to a US or Canadian university for a faculty post needs to build a long-form academic CV, not the two-page CV they may already have on file. Conversely, a US-trained researcher applying for many European industry or non-academic roles may need to condense their CV into a Europass-style document. When a funder or employer says “CV,” always check which convention they mean and, where possible, look for a stated page limit or template before assuming either format.
Standard Sections of an Academic CV, in Conventional Order
There is no single universal template, but most academic CVs follow a broadly consistent order. A typical structure runs:
- Contact information and identifiers — name, institutional affiliation, email, and your ORCID iD. Including your ORCID iD at the top of the CV is now a widely expected convention, since it gives reviewers and administrators a single, disambiguated link to your full ORCID record and publication history.
- Education — degrees in reverse-chronological order, with institution, department or field, and completion date; dissertation/thesis title is often included for the terminal degree.
- Academic and professional appointments — positions held, in reverse-chronological order, with institution and dates.
- Honours and awards — fellowships, prizes, and other recognitions, dated.
- Grants and funding — each entry should specify your role (PI, co-PI, co-investigator), the sponsor, the amount, and the funding period, so a reader can assess both the scale of support you have secured and your level of responsibility for it.
- Publications — typically the longest section, and conventionally subdivided (see below).
- Talks and presentations — invited talks, conference presentations, and posters, usually separated from one another and dated.
- Teaching — courses taught, with level (undergraduate/graduate) and role (instructor of record vs. teaching assistant).
- Supervision and mentoring — graduate students, postdocs, or undergraduates supervised, often with their outcomes (degree completed, current position).
- Service — editorial board membership, peer review activity, and committee service, often split into departmental, institutional, and disciplinary/professional service.
- Professional memberships — societies and associations.
- References — sometimes included with contact details, more often simply noted as “available upon request,” depending on discipline and application norms.
Subdividing the Publications Section
A publications section that mixes every output type into one undifferentiated list becomes hard to evaluate. Convention is to subsection by output type, typically in this order: peer-reviewed journal articles, preprints, book chapters, books (authored and edited), conference proceedings, datasets, and software. Not every CV needs every subsection — include only the categories where you actually have output — but keeping datasets and software as their own labeled categories, rather than omitting them, reflects the growing recognition of non-article research outputs in assessment.
Publication List Conventions
Within each publications subsection, a small set of conventions is expected almost universally:
- Reverse-chronological order within each subsection, most recent first.
- A consistent citation style throughout — pick one format (author-date, numbered, or a discipline-standard style) and apply it uniformly rather than mixing styles across entries.
- Bold your own name in every author list, so a reader scanning a long multi-author byline can immediately locate you.
- Mark corresponding authorship and co-first/co-senior authorship explicitly — an asterisk or superscript with a footnote is standard — since author order alone often does not communicate these roles, and they matter to how a committee reads your contribution.
- Label preprints and under-review work honestly. A manuscript posted to a preprint server but not yet peer-reviewed should be marked “preprint” and never presented as if it were a peer-reviewed publication. Work genuinely under review should be labeled “submitted” or “under review,” and work still being written should be labeled “in preparation” or “manuscript in progress” rather than omitted from a subsection that implies it has cleared peer review. These labels are not a formality — a search or promotion committee is making decisions based on what they believe your track record actually is.
Funder-Specific CV and Biosketch Formats
Grant applications typically do not accept a free-form academic CV at all. Most major funders require a structured, standardized biographical document with its own required sections and, often, its own preparation tool. Formats change relatively often, so treat the summaries below as orientation, not a substitute for checking each funder’s current guidance before you prepare a submission.
NIH Biosketch
NIH has moved away from the five-page narrative biosketch format it used for years (personal statement, positions and honors, contributions to science, and, where relevant, a research support section) toward the NIH Biographical Sketch Common Form, prepared in SciENcv alongside a separate NIH Biosketch Supplement, as part of NIH’s broader shift to standardized cross-agency Common Forms. Because this transition has been implemented in stages through a sequence of NIH Guide notices, confirm the exact current structure and page limits on NIH’s own Biosketch Format Pages before preparing a submission — do not rely on an older template you may have used previously.
NSF Biographical Sketch (via SciENcv)
NSF requires the Biographical Sketch to be prepared in SciENcv — a fillable-PDF alternative was retired, making SciENcv mandatory. The current NSPM-33 Common Form structure NSF (and NIH) build on has six sections: Identifying Information, Organization and Location, Professional Preparation, Appointments and Positions, Products (up to five products most closely related to the proposed project, plus up to five other significant products, with no fixed page or character limit), and Certification. Two related documents are explicitly not prepared inside SciENcv: Synergistic Activities is a separate one-page document uploaded as its own PDF, and Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) uses NSF’s required spreadsheet template uploaded directly to Research.gov. Confusing these three documents, or assuming Synergistic Activities is still folded into the biosketch, is a common and avoidable submission error.
ERC and Horizon Europe: CV and Track Record
ERC grant applications include a combined “CV and Track Record” section as part of the scientific proposal (alongside the extended synopsis and, for later stages, the full research proposal). The ERC does not mandate a rigid section-by-section template the way NIH and NSF now do — applicants are told that format is largely a personal choice as long as the document is clear — but it does set page limits that vary by grant type (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, Synergy) and by call year, and it specifically asks applicants to select a small number of key outputs (commonly framed as up to ten) and explain why each matters for the proposed project, rather than simply listing a full publication record. This is distinct from the Europass CV mentioned above, which is the general EU standard-format CV used for job mobility, not a substitute for the ERC’s own CV-and-track-record document. Always check the current ERC Work Programme and the specific call’s proposal template for exact page limits before drafting.
UKRI R4RI (Resume for Research and Innovation)
UKRI has replaced the traditional CV across most of its funding opportunities with the Resume for Research and Innovation (R4RI), submitted through the UKRI Funding Service. R4RI is UKRI’s implementation of the Royal Society’s narrative-CV template and structures an applicant’s track record around four short free-text modules describing their contribution to: the generation of new knowledge, the development of other individuals, the wider research community, and broader society. Reviewers are guided to assess these narratives qualitatively rather than by counting publications. See the R4RI mandate for how the rollout was phased in, and this site’s dedicated comparison of NIH biosketch vs. UKRI R4RI for a side-by-side look at how the US and UK approaches to structured researcher CVs now differ.
National Researcher CV Platforms
Outside these funder-specific formats, a number of countries maintain their own standardized, government-run researcher CV platforms that function as a national equivalent to a structured biosketch — used for funding applications, institutional evaluation, and researcher identification within that country’s science system. Examples covered elsewhere on this site include Spain’s CVN (Currículum Vitae Normalizado), Colombia’s CvLAC, Portugal’s CIÊNCIAVITAE, and Argentina’s SIGEVA. Researchers who collaborate internationally or apply to national funding schemes should expect to maintain a profile on their country’s platform in addition to whatever CV format a specific funder or employer requests.
Narrative CVs and the Move Away From Publication-Count Metrics
The shift toward narrative formats like R4RI is not an isolated UKRI decision — it is part of a broader research-assessment reform movement that treats raw publication counts, journal-prestige proxies (like using a journal’s impact factor to judge an individual article or author), and other quantitative shortcuts as poor and often misleading measures of research quality or a researcher’s actual contribution.
- The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a widely signed commitment by institutions, funders, and publishers not to use journal-based metrics as a proxy for the quality of individual articles or researchers in hiring, tenure, and funding decisions.
- The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is a broader, more recent coalition of universities, funders, and research organizations working toward reformed, multidimensional assessment practices, with signatories now numbering in the hundreds across Europe and beyond.
- The Netherlands’ national Recognition and Rewards programme, developed jointly by Dutch universities, university medical centres, NWO, ZonMw, and other national bodies, is one of the most developed institutional examples of this shift — moving hiring, promotion, and evaluation criteria away from output counts and toward a broader, narrative-supported assessment of a researcher’s contributions across teaching, research, leadership, and societal impact.
The practical implication for anyone preparing an academic CV is that “more publications” is no longer a reliable universal strategy. Where a funder or institution has adopted a narrative or reformed-assessment approach, a CV or track-record document that simply lists output volume — without explaining significance, role, and contribution — is likely to read as poorly matched to how it will actually be evaluated. This site’s dictionary also covers related concepts worth understanding alongside these frameworks, including responsible metrics and process diversity in assessment.
Automation: How Much of a CV Can Now Populate Itself
Maintaining a career-length CV by hand is genuinely burdensome, and a growing amount of the routine content can now be generated or auto-populated rather than typed from scratch:
- ORCID auto-population. An ORCID record can automatically import works metadata from Crossref, DataCite, and other trusted-organization sources once you have connected them, meaning a well-maintained ORCID iD becomes a continuously updating source of truth for your publication list rather than something you re-type for every new CV.
- SciENcv. NIH and NSF’s shared biosketch-preparation tool pulls directly from a linked ORCID record and, for NIH submissions, from eRA Commons, letting a researcher generate a compliant biosketch largely from data that already exists elsewhere rather than re-entering it manually. Keeping your ORCID record accurate and current is now a direct prerequisite for an efficient SciENcv-based submission, not just good practice for its own sake.
- Faculty activity reporting (FAR) systems. Institutional platforms such as Watermark Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures) and comparable research-analytics tools ingest CV-style data — publications, grants, teaching, service — and generate annual activity reports and promotion and tenure dossiers directly from it. See this site’s guide to faculty activity reports for how these systems are typically structured and what they draw on.
The common thread across all three is that the underlying, well-structured data — accurate ORCID records, correctly attributed CRediT contributor roles, clean grant and appointment records — is what makes automatic CV and biosketch generation possible at all. See how ORCID imports CRediT contributor roles for more on that underlying mechanism.
Integrity: A CV Is a Factual Document, Not a Marketing Document
Because a CV feeds directly into hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, misrepresenting its contents is treated by most institutions as a research-integrity or professional-conduct matter, not a harmless exaggeration. The same honesty standards that apply to authorship and contribution reporting on a manuscript apply to how that same work is described on a CV:
- Report your actual authorship position and role accurately. Do not reorder authors, imply a first-author or corresponding-author role you did not hold, or otherwise present your contribution as larger than it was.
- Do not inflate your contribution. If your role on a paper or grant was more limited than the CV entry implies, that mismatch is discoverable — reviewers routinely check ORCID records, CRediT statements, and grant databases against CV claims — and it can materially undermine trust in the rest of the document once found.
- Label submitted, in-preparation, and preprint work honestly, as covered above. Presenting unpublished or unreviewed work as if it were peer-reviewed and published is one of the most common forms of CV misrepresentation and is straightforward for a search or funding committee to catch.
- Do not list degrees, positions, or funding you did not actually hold or receive. This applies with particular force to the education and grants sections, where verification against institutional or funder records is routine at later stages of hiring and award processes.
None of this is exotic guidance — it is the same standard that governs honest authorship and contribution reporting elsewhere in scholarly communication, simply applied to the document where that record gets summarized and presented for evaluation.
Tailoring Your CV: Jobs, Promotion Dossiers, and Grant Applications
An academic CV is rarely used unmodified across every context. Three situations call for meaningfully different versions:
- Job applications. Tailor emphasis to the position and institution type — a teaching-intensive institution will weight teaching experience and pedagogy more heavily than a research-intensive one, and a CV aimed at an industry or non-academic role may need to be substantially condensed into a resume-style document rather than submitted as a full academic CV.
- Promotion and tenure dossiers. Most institutions pair the CV with a separate narrative statement that interprets the CV’s contents against the institution’s specific promotion criteria, rather than expecting the CV alone to make the case. See this site’s guide to writing a promotion and tenure narrative statement, and, where a personal statement is required, personal statement examples for researchers.
- Grant applications. As covered above, most funders require a specific structured format — a biosketch, an R4RI narrative, or a bespoke CV-and-track-record document — rather than accepting a general academic CV. Submitting your standard long-form CV where a funder requires SciENcv, R4RI, or an equivalent structured document is a common and avoidable compliance error, distinct from a research statement, which is covered separately in this site’s guide to writing a research statement for a faculty application.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is an academic CV the same thing as a resume?
Not in US, Canadian, or general academic usage: a CV is a comprehensive, unlimited-length career record, while a resume is a targeted one- to two-page summary. In UK and much of European usage, “CV” instead refers to what Americans call a resume — a short document — which is a frequent source of confusion in international job and funding applications.
How long should a scientific CV be?
There is no fixed page limit for a conventional academic CV in US/Canadian usage — it grows with your career and can reasonably run to many pages for a senior researcher. Funder-specific formats such as NIH’s biosketch, NSF’s SciENcv product, or UKRI’s R4RI are different: they carry explicit page or item limits set by the funder, and you should follow those limits exactly rather than treating them as a general CV.
Should I include my ORCID iD on my CV?
Yes. Placing your ORCID iD near your contact information at the top of the CV is now standard practice, since it gives reviewers a single, disambiguated link to your verified publication and affiliation history.
How do I list a preprint or a manuscript still under review?
Label it accurately — “preprint,” “submitted,” “under review,” or “in preparation,” as appropriate — rather than presenting it in a way that implies peer-reviewed publication. Many CVs keep preprints and under-review work in a clearly separated subsection of the publications list for exactly this reason.
What is a narrative CV, and why are funders moving toward it?
A narrative CV replaces exhaustive lists of outputs with a small number of structured, free-text sections in which the applicant explains their contribution and its significance. UKRI’s R4RI and the Royal Society’s Resume for Researchers template are the best-known examples. Funders have adopted this format as part of a broader research-assessment reform movement, associated with DORA and CoARA, aimed at reducing reliance on publication counts and journal-prestige proxies as measures of a researcher’s quality or potential.
Can SciENcv build my biosketch automatically from my ORCID profile?
SciENcv can pull directly from a linked ORCID record (and, for NIH submissions, from eRA Commons) to populate much of a biosketch, which substantially reduces manual re-entry — but you still need to review the generated document against the current required format before submitting, since auto-population does not guarantee the result matches every current formatting requirement.
