For a decade, “responsible research assessment” was mostly a matter of declarations — statements of principle that institutions signed and then struggled to operationalise. That has changed. Assessment reform has moved from declaration to practice, and anyone who now evaluates research or researchers — on a hiring panel, a promotion committee, or a grant board — is increasingly expected to do so by methods that the reform movement has made concrete. This article sets out how the three load-bearing pieces — DORA, CoARA, and the narrative CV — fit together, and what they ask of an evaluator. It draws on the responsible-assessment domain.
DORA: the declaration that named the problem
The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), issued in 2013, was the movement’s opening move. Its central target was the misuse of the journal impact factor as a proxy for the quality of individual papers and individual researchers. DORA’s argument was straightforward: a journal-level metric says nothing reliable about any single article published in that journal, and using it to judge a researcher’s work — for hiring, promotion, or funding — is a category error. DORA asked institutions, funders, and publishers to stop doing it, and to assess research on its own merits.
DORA’s contribution was to name the problem clearly and to gather signatories — thousands of them — behind the principle. What it deliberately did not do was prescribe a detailed alternative. It was a declaration of what to stop, more than a manual for what to start. That left a gap, which the next decade’s work set out to fill.
CoARA: from principle to coalition commitment
The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), launched in 2022, is the operational successor in spirit. Where DORA asked organisations to agree with a principle, CoARA asks members to commit to a reform agreement and to produce action plans for changing their own assessment practices. Its membership runs to hundreds of organisations — universities, funders, learned societies — across Europe and beyond.
The shift from DORA to CoARA is the shift from “we endorse this” to “here is what we will change and by when.” CoARA’s commitments include recognising a diversity of research outputs and activities, basing assessment primarily on qualitative judgement supported by responsible use of metrics rather than the reverse, and abandoning inappropriate uses of journal- and publication-based metrics. It is, in effect, DORA’s principle turned into an implementation programme that members are accountable to.
The narrative CV: the practical instrument
If DORA named the problem and CoARA organised the commitment, the narrative CV is the instrument through which reform actually reaches an individual assessment. A narrative CV is a free-text format in which a researcher describes their contributions in prose, structured around a small set of prompts, rather than presenting an enumerated list of publications and metrics. The best-known implementation is UKRI’s Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI), which became standard across all UKRI funding from January 2024, building on the Royal Society’s earlier Résumé for Researchers. Wellcome, several other funders, and a number of institutions run their own variants.
The narrative CV typically asks a researcher to describe their contributions across several dimensions — to the generation of knowledge, to the development of individuals, to the wider research community, and to broader society — rather than to list outputs by venue. The point is to make visible the contributions that a publication list renders invisible: mentorship, team building, peer review, open-science work, and the other forms of hidden labour that the Hidden REF initiative has campaigned to recognise. It is the mechanism by which a panel can assess a researcher as a contributor to research culture, not merely as a producer of papers.
Responsible metrics, not no metrics
A persistent misreading of this movement is that it is anti-metric. It is not. The principle, articulated in the Leiden Manifesto of 2015 and carried through CoARA, is responsible metrics: the principled use of quantitative indicators, always contextualised, always combined with qualitative expert judgement, never used as a substitute for reading the work. The objection is not to counting things; it is to letting a count — especially a journal-level one — stand in for judgement about an individual contribution. A responsible assessment may well use metrics; it simply refuses to let them do the assessing.
How the three fit together
The relationship is a progression from principle to practice. DORA supplies the foundational principle: do not mistake journal metrics for research quality. CoARA supplies the organised commitment and accountability: members agree to reform and publish how. The narrative CV supplies the concrete instrument: a format that forces an assessment to engage with what a researcher actually contributed. An evaluator working responsibly today is, in effect, applying DORA’s principle through CoARA-aligned practice using narrative-CV instruments.
What responsible assessment asks of an evaluator
Concretely, the movement asks an evaluator to read the work rather than its venue; to weigh a diversity of outputs — datasets, software, protocols, models — alongside articles, which presupposes a modern outputs taxonomy that recognises them; to use metrics only in support of judgement, never as a proxy for an individual’s worth; to recognise the hidden labour the narrative format is designed to surface; and to apply consistent qualitative criteria through a shared rubric, so that “narrative” does not become “unstructured and incomparable.”
That last point is the live challenge. A narrative CV trades the false precision of metrics for the richer but less standardised evidence of prose, and prose is harder to compare across candidates. The answer is not to retreat to metrics but to develop shared rubrics so that narrative assessments are rigorous and fair rather than impressionistic.
Where the dictionary fits
Responsible assessment is awash with terms that every funder and institution defines slightly differently — narrative CV, contribution narrative, responsible metrics, hidden labour, team science. Without shared definitions, every reviewer reinvents their own rubric, which is exactly the inconsistency the movement is trying to escape. A shared, operational vocabulary for these concepts is what lets a narrative-CV reviewer at one institution mean the same thing as one at another. Providing that vocabulary — and pointing to DORA, CoARA, and UKRI for the normative content — is the convening role the CASRAI dictionary is built for. For a side-by-side account of the two frameworks, see our DORA versus CoARA comparison.
What to do now
For evaluators: read the work, use metrics only responsibly and in support of judgement, and engage seriously with the contributions a narrative CV surfaces. For institutions and funders: align practice with CoARA commitments and adopt narrative-CV formats with shared, qualitative rubrics so that assessments are comparable and fair. For standards work: define the responsible-assessment vocabulary operationally, federating to DORA, CoARA, and the funder narrative-CV guidance.
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