Ask a senior researcher what they are proudest of and a surprising number will not name a paper. They will name a person: the doctoral student who became an independent investigator, the postdoc they steered through a hard patch, the colleague they brought into a field. Mentorship, training, and the quieter work of holding a group together are the connective tissue of research careers — and they are precisely the parts a conventional CV cannot show. A publication list records outputs; it is silent on the people a researcher made possible. This article sets out how the narrative CV and the broader responsible-assessment movement aim to recognise the whole researcher, drawing on the mentorship and career-stages domain.
Career stages are not interchangeable
Before mentorship can be credited, the people involved have to be describable, and research careers have a structure that a flat “academic” label erases. A doctoral researcher is enrolled in or funded for doctoral training; a postdoctoral researcher occupies a training-and-development position in the years after the doctorate; an early-career researcher (ECR) falls within a defined early window whose exact bounds vary by funder. Beyond these sit the mid-career researcher and the established researcher, alongside roles that do not fit the linear model at all — the practitioner-researcher whose primary work is clinical or professional, and the part-time researcher on a fractional contract.
Getting these distinctions right is the precondition for fair evaluation. An achievement that is routine for an established researcher may be exceptional for an ECR, and assessing the two against an identical yardstick is a category error. This is why the vocabulary of career stage underpins the practice of career-stage adjustment — calibrating expectations to where a researcher is, not where the most senior applicant happens to be.
Career breaks and the shape of a real career
Real careers are not continuous, and an assessment system that assumes they are penalises exactly the people it should support. A controlled vocabulary therefore needs to name the kinds of interruption a career sustains: a career break (parental), a career break (caring), a career break (illness), and others. Recorded as structured facts, these breaks let a funder make a career-stage adjustment fairly — reading productivity relative to time actually available for research rather than elapsed calendar time, rather than reading a gap in a publication list as a gap in ability.
Mentorship as a creditable contribution
With people and timelines describable, mentorship itself can be made visible. The vocabulary distinguishes a primary mentor, with principal responsibility for a researcher’s development in a period, from a secondary mentor in a supporting role; and it recognises specific forms such as the thesis supervisor and the postdoc mentor. Crucially, it also records outcomes: a mentee completion — a degree awarded, a postdoc transitioned to their next position — is a documented result of mentorship, not merely an activity claimed.
This connects directly to the contribution taxonomies. The CRediT role of Supervision is defined as “oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team” — an explicit acknowledgement that mentoring is a creditable contribution to a research output, not a soft extra. CRediT’s fourteen roles do not, on their own, capture a mentoring relationship spanning years and many outputs, which is part of why the narrative form matters; but the principle that supervision and mentorship are nameable contributions is already settled in the standard.
The narrative CV: room for the whole record
The instrument built to carry all of this is the narrative CV — a CV format that describes a researcher’s contributions in narrative form rather than as an enumerated list of outputs. Its purpose is to make room for the contributions a publication list cannot hold: mentorship, training, service, and the care work in research — the pastoral support and community-building that sustain a group but never appear on a paper.
The narrative CV is not a fringe experiment. The Royal Society’s Résumé for Researchers pioneered the format in the UK, and UKRI’s Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI) built on it, becoming standard across UKRI funding; the Wellcome Trust operates its own variant. These formats typically structure the narrative around modules — contributions to the generation of knowledge, to the development of individuals, to the research community, and to broader society — which is, in effect, a deliberate invitation to describe one’s mentees, trainees, and team-building alongside one’s papers.
The narrative CV does not abolish the publication list; it reframes it. The question shifts from “how many outputs, in which venues?” to “what did this researcher contribute, including the people they developed and the community they built?” Only the second question has room for a mentor’s life’s work.
The reform movement behind the format
The narrative CV is one expression of a wider reorientation in how research is assessed. The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) set out, from 2013, the case against over-reliance on journal-based metrics, and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has since organised institutions around concrete reform commitments. The two are complementary rather than competing — a relationship explored in DORA vs CoARA — and both push toward judging contribution in context rather than by proxy. Alongside them, initiatives such as the Hidden REF have worked to surface the hidden labour — the mentoring, the technical work, the community-building — that conventional evaluation renders invisible.
Why this belongs in a metadata standard
A narrative CV read by a human is valuable; a narrative CV whose claims connect to structured, verifiable records is more valuable still. When a stated mentee completion links to a real person’s ORCID iD and their documented transition, when a career break is a recorded fact a funder can apply consistently, and when a supervision contribution is captured in CRediT against specific outputs, the narrative stops being unverifiable prose and becomes a story anchored in data. That is the bridge between the narrative CV’s humane breadth and the rigour that assessment requires — and building the vocabulary that lets mentorship, career stage, and career breaks be recorded consistently is squarely within CASRAI’s remit.
Where shared vocabulary fits
The terms here are easy to blur: a primary mentor is not a secondary one, an ECR is not a mid-career researcher, a career break is a recorded fact and not a deficiency. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these precisely — pointing to UKRI for R4RI, to the Royal Society for the Résumé for Researchers, and to DORA and CoARA for the assessment principles — is what lets a mentorship record or a narrative claim made in one system be understood and credited in another. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play.
What to do now
For researchers: record your mentees, their completions, your training contributions, and your career breaks as structured facts, not just narrative claims. For funders and institutions: adopt narrative CV formats that make room for the whole researcher, and apply career-stage adjustments consistently from recorded data. For standards work: define the vocabulary of career stages, mentorship roles, and career breaks, federating to UKRI, the Royal Society, DORA, and CoARA for the authoritative content.