CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: responsible research assessment

  • Crediting mentorship and the narrative CV: recognising the whole researcher

    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.

    Related reading

  • Responsible research assessment in hiring and promotion

    Few decisions shape a research career more than those made at the moment of hiring, tenure and promotion. They determine who enters the profession, who advances, and whose work is rewarded — and in doing so they send a powerful signal about what the system values. For decades, those decisions have leaned heavily on a familiar set of shortcuts: the prestige of the journals a researcher has published in, the impact factor attached to those journals, the raw count of their publications, and the citations they have accumulated. These proxies are seductive because they are quick and appear objective. But a growing movement argues they are also distorting — rewarding the wrong things, overlooking much of what researchers genuinely contribute, and shaping behaviour in ways that harm research itself. This article examines the reform of assessment in hiring and promotion, drawing on the responsible-assessment domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    What the metric-driven approach gets wrong

    The case against journal-based and citation-based assessment is not that numbers are useless but that they are being asked to do work they cannot do. The journal impact factor is a measure of a journal’s average citation performance; it says nothing reliable about the quality or significance of any individual article within it, still less about the researcher who wrote it. Using it to judge people is a category error. Citation counts, meanwhile, are slow, field-dependent and easily distorted, and they capture only one narrow kind of influence. More corrosively, when careers depend on these proxies, researchers are pushed to chase them — prioritising quantity, fashionable topics, more papers, and venues where the metrics are favourable. The metric stops measuring behaviour and starts driving it, and much of what research needs — rigorous replication, careful data curation, mentoring, software, public engagement — goes unrewarded because it does not show up in the count.

    DORA and the founding principle

    The reform movement’s most influential starting point is the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Its central recommendation is simple and far-reaching: do not use journal-based metrics, such as the impact factor, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles or of the contributions of individual researchers in hiring, promotion and funding decisions. Instead, DORA urges that research be assessed on its own merits and that the full range of research outputs and activities be valued. Thousands of organisations and individuals have signed, committing to change how they evaluate. DORA’s power lies in naming the central abuse plainly and asking institutions to stop it — making the misuse of the impact factor something an organisation must publicly disavow rather than quietly perpetuate.

    The Leiden Manifesto and the Hong Kong Principles

    Other frameworks complement DORA. The Leiden Manifesto sets out principles for the responsible use of metrics — that quantitative evaluation should support, not supplant, expert qualitative judgement; that measurement be aligned with the mission of institution and researcher; that data and analysis be open and verifiable; and that indicators account for variation by field. It does not reject metrics but disciplines them. The Hong Kong Principles focus on assessing researchers in ways that reward trustworthy research — recognising open, rigorous and reproducible practices and the full range of research activities — so that assessment pulls towards integrity rather than against it. Together these frameworks describe an assessment system that uses judgement supported by responsible indicators, rather than indicators in place of judgement.

    CoARA and the move from declaration to action

    The most ambitious recent development is the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and its Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment. CoARA moves the conversation from principle to implementation: signatory organisations commit to concrete reform, including basing assessment primarily on qualitative judgement supported by responsible use of quantitative indicators, recognising the diversity of research outputs and activities, and abandoning the inappropriate use of journal- and publication-based metrics. Crucially, CoARA asks organisations to actually change their criteria and processes — their hiring rubrics, their promotion frameworks — and to share progress, turning broad agreement into the difficult, practical work of rewriting the rules by which careers are judged.

    The narrative CV as a practical instrument

    If institutions are to stop counting papers and start assessing contribution, they need a different way of presenting a career — and the narrative CV has become the leading answer. Instead of a long list of outputs and metrics, a narrative CV asks researchers to describe their contributions in prose: what they have contributed to the generation of knowledge, to the research community, to wider society, and to the people and teams they have worked with. This format makes space for exactly the things metrics miss — mentoring, data and software, collaboration, public engagement, contributions to research culture — and it invites qualitative peer judgement of substance rather than mechanical comparison of numbers. The narrative CV is not a panacea; it must be assessed fairly and consistently. But it embodies the reform agenda in a single document: it asks what someone did and why it mattered, rather than where and how often they published.

    Contribution, vocabulary and fair judgement

    Assessing contribution fairly depends on being able to describe contributions clearly and consistently. This is where structured accounts of who did what become valuable: the CRediT taxonomy, whose full set of contribution types is set out in our overview of the CRediT roles, lets a researcher’s actual role in their work be stated rather than inferred from a byline — supporting the kind of contribution-based assessment these reforms call for, and connecting naturally to the wider conduct of authorship and contributorship. For assessment to be fair across institutions and systems, the terms used to describe outputs, roles and contributions must mean the same thing everywhere; that consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides. Reforming assessment is ultimately about realigning reward with worth — ensuring that the people who do the most valuable research, in all its forms, are the people the system recognises and advances.