Research administrators preparing institutional guidance ahead of the REF 2029 cycle are increasingly asking the same question: what does a good narrative CV academia example actually look like, and how do we build a template our researchers will actually use? The shift away from publication counts and journal impact factors toward structured, narrative-style CVs — pioneered by UKRI’s Résumé for Research and Innovation and echoed in funder policies across Europe — is no longer experimental. It is fast becoming the default expectation for grant applications, promotion cases, and fellowship reviews.
The pressure is coming from several directions at once. The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has spent a decade arguing that journal-level metrics are poor proxies for the quality of individual contributions. The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) — whose CoARA agreement now counts hundreds of signatory universities, funders, and national agencies — commits members to reforming assessment criteria to reward openness, collaboration, and societal contribution alongside traditional outputs. UKRI’s own narrative CV format, built around the Résumé for Research and Innovation, has been mandatory for many grant schemes since 2021 and continues to expand into new panels as the REF 2029 cycle takes shape.
For institutions still relying on traditional CV templates, this creates a practical gap: researchers need concrete examples and adaptable structures, not just policy statements. This piece sets out what a workable narrative CV template looks like in practice, how it aligns with responsible metrics principles, and what research administrators should build now.
A Narrative CV Academia Example: Inside the UKRI Résumé for Research and Innovation
UKRI’s Résumé for Research and Innovation format organises a career narrative around four headings rather than a chronological list of outputs:
- Contributions to the generation of knowledge — research outputs, but framed around significance and contribution rather than volume or venue.
- Contributions to the development of individuals — mentoring, supervision, training delivery, and team leadership.
- Contributions to the wider research community — peer review, editorial roles, committee service, and infrastructure work.
- Contributions to broader society — public engagement, policy influence, and translation of research into practice.
Applicants are asked to select a limited number of contributions under each heading and describe, in plain narrative prose, what they did, why it mattered, and what role they played — particularly important for collaborative or multi-author work where a simple author list obscures individual contribution. This is precisely where the CRediT contributor role taxonomy becomes useful as a supporting tool. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, and the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022; the fourteen defined roles (conceptualisation, methodology, investigation, funding acquisition, and so on) give applicants a controlled vocabulary for describing exactly what they contributed to a joint output, rather than relying on author position or vague phrasing such as “significant contribution.”
Other funders and institutions have adapted similar structures. The Swiss National Science Foundation, the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and several UK universities’ promotion frameworks now use comparable narrative sections, typically capped at two to four pages, with explicit prompts to avoid journal names, impact factors, or citation counts as stand-alone evidence of quality.
Why Narrative Formats Align with DORA, CoARA, and the Leiden Manifesto
Narrative CVs did not emerge in isolation. They are the practical expression of three overlapping reform movements that research administrators should understand as a connected policy landscape rather than separate initiatives:
- DORA asks institutions to stop using journal impact factor as a proxy for the quality of individual research articles, and to evaluate scientific content on its own merits.
- The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics sets out ten principles for the responsible use of research metrics, including that quantitative evaluation should support, not replace, qualitative expert assessment, and that metrics should be transparent and verifiable to those being evaluated.
- The CoARA agreement operationalises both, committing signatories to a multi-year reform trajectory that recognises a diversity of outputs and moves away from inappropriate uses of metrics such as journal impact factor and h-index in individual assessment.
Together these frameworks describe what responsible research metrics look like in practice: quantitative indicators used transparently, alongside — never instead of — qualitative judgement about actual contribution. A narrative CV is the assessment instrument that makes this operational at the level of an individual application or promotion case. It forces panels to read what someone actually did, rather than defaulting to citation counts or journal prestige as a shortcut.
This matters because the responsible use of research metrics is not simply an ethical preference; it is increasingly a compliance requirement. Funders that have signed the CoARA agreement are expected to demonstrate progress against its commitments in periodic reporting, and institutional promotion committees are under growing scrutiny — from researchers, unions, and equality bodies — to show that assessment criteria do not systematically disadvantage early-career staff, caring responsibilities, or non-traditional research paths.
Building an Adaptable Narrative CV Template for Your Institution
Research administrators do not need to invent a format from scratch. A workable institutional template can be adapted directly from the UKRI structure, with three practical additions:
- A CRediT-referenced contributions table. Alongside the narrative prose, ask applicants to tag their top outputs with CRediT roles. This gives panels an at-a-glance, standardised way to see contribution type without reading full narrative text for every output.
- Explicit word or character limits per section. UKRI’s model works because it is bounded — typically around 250 words per contribution. Unbounded narrative sections tend to reproduce the same volume problem narrative CVs were designed to solve.
- Panel training guidance, not just applicant guidance. The most common implementation failure is training applicants to write narrative CVs while leaving assessment panels to fall back on old habits — scanning for journal names and citation counts. Any template rollout should be paired with a short panel briefing on how to read and score narrative content consistently.
Institutions adopting this approach should also publish a short worked example — a genuinely useful narrative CV academia example drawn from a real (anonymised or composite) case — alongside the template itself. Researchers consistently report that abstract guidance is far less useful than seeing one well-written section under each heading.
What This Means for Research Administrators
The practical implications for research administration offices are immediate and cut across several functions. Grants offices need to update internal application checklists so that narrative CV sections are reviewed pre-submission, since panels will reject applications that revert to a standard chronological CV. Promotion and tenure committees need updated criteria documents that explicitly reference contribution-based narrative rather than output count, with clear guidance on how CRediT-tagged contributions should be weighted. Research information systems (CRIS platforms) should be checked for the ability to export CRediT role data alongside publication records, since manually reconstructing contribution history for every grant round is not sustainable at scale.
There is also a change-management dimension. Senior academics who built careers under metric-heavy assessment regimes may be the most resistant to narrative formats, viewing them as subjective or time-consuming. Framing the change around the Leiden Manifesto’s evidence base — that metrics-only assessment produces systematic distortions, including gaming behaviour and disincentives for open, collaborative, or translational work — tends to land better with sceptical audiences than framing built purely around funder compliance.
A Direction of Travel, Not a Passing Trend
Narrative CVs are not a temporary funder fashion. They are the assessment-level implementation of a decade-long reform movement running through DORA, the Leiden Manifesto, and now the CoARA agreement’s institutional commitments. As REF 2029 preparations accelerate and more funders align their application formats with UKRI’s approach, institutions that have already built adaptable templates, panel training, and CRediT-referenced contribution records will be better positioned than those treating each funder’s narrative format as a one-off compliance exercise. The practical work now sits squarely with research administrators: translate policy commitment into templates, guidance, and panel practice that researchers can actually use.
