CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: UKCGE

  • Supervision as Scholarship: Recognising Doctoral Mentorship

    Ask any successful researcher about the moments that shaped their career, and a good supervisor will often feature prominently. Doctoral supervision is where much of the craft of research is actually taught: how to frame a question, navigate failure, write for a critical audience, and develop into an independent scholar. It is intensive, skilled, and consequential work. And yet, in the systems that train, assess, and reward researchers, supervision has long been treated as something that simply happens rather than as scholarly labour deserving recognition.

    The undervaluing of supervision

    Several factors contribute to supervision being overlooked. It is largely invisible in the outputs that assessment systems count: a thesis carries the student’s name, not the supervisor’s, and the supervisor’s contribution rarely surfaces in publication records in any structured way. Supervisory skill is often assumed rather than developed, with many academics expected to supervise well simply because they were once supervised. And because supervision is relational and long-term, its quality is hard to capture in the snapshot metrics that dominate evaluation. The result is that an activity central to the reproduction of the research workforce sits awkwardly outside the reward structures that govern academic careers.

    The UKCGE Good Supervisory Practice Framework

    The UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE) developed the Good Supervisory Practice Framework to address this gap by articulating what good supervision actually involves. Rather than treating supervision as a single undifferentiated task, the framework breaks it into distinct areas of practice, spanning the supervisor’s responsibilities to the candidate, to the project, and to the wider research environment. It covers the supervisory relationship, the management of the project, the support of the candidate’s development and wellbeing, the encouragement of writing and the examination process, and the supervisor’s own continuing development.

    By naming these areas explicitly, the framework turns a tacit skill into something that can be discussed, taught, and assessed. It gives institutions a shared vocabulary for supervisor development and gives supervisors themselves a structured way to reflect on and improve their practice.

    The Research Supervision Recognition Programme

    Building on the framework, UKCGE established the Research Supervision Recognition Programme, which allows experienced supervisors to gain formal recognition for their practice against the framework’s areas. Applicants reflect on and evidence how they supervise, and successful recognition provides a credential that acknowledges supervisory expertise in its own right. This matters because it creates a tangible, portable marker of a kind of work that otherwise leaves little trace. It signals that supervision is a professional competence to be developed and recognised, not an automatic by-product of holding an academic post.

    The CRediT Supervision role

    The third piece concerns how supervisory contributions appear in the scholarly record. The CRediT taxonomy, which standardises the description of contributor roles in research outputs, includes a Supervision role, defined as oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. Where journals and institutions adopt CRediT, this role makes it possible to record, in a structured and machine-readable way, that a named individual provided supervisory leadership for a piece of work.

    That may sound like a small administrative detail, but it has real consequences. When supervision is captured as a recognised contributor role, it becomes part of the data that describes who did what in research. It can be aggregated, cited, and surfaced in assessment, rather than vanishing into the gap between authorship and acknowledgement. The vocabularies that make such structured contribution records possible are exactly the kind of standards catalogued in the CASRAI data dictionary.

    Why recognition matters

    Making supervision visible is not merely a matter of fairness to supervisors, though it is that too. It also serves quality and integrity. When supervision is recognised and assessed, institutions have an incentive to support it properly, through training, workload allocation, and development. Good supervision, in turn, shapes the rigour, openness, and responsible conduct of the next generation of researchers, reinforcing the responsible practices that frameworks for research assessment increasingly reward. Poorly supported supervision, by contrast, can leave candidates isolated and at risk, with consequences for wellbeing and for the quality of the research produced.

    Bringing supervision into the open

    Together, the UKCGE framework, its recognition programme, and the CRediT Supervision role form a coherent answer to a longstanding problem. The framework describes what good supervision is; the recognition programme rewards demonstrated expertise; and the CRediT role records supervisory contributions in the scholarly record. Treating supervision as scholarly labour, rather than an invisible obligation, makes it possible to develop it deliberately, recognise it fairly, and account for it transparently, to the benefit of supervisors, candidates, and research as a whole.

  • Researcher development frameworks: Vitae and recognising career-stage progression

    It is easy to count a researcher’s outputs and much harder to describe how they have grown. A doctoral student becomes an independent investigator; a postdoctoral researcher learns to lead, to supervise, to win funding, to manage a project; a mid-career academic develops the judgement and the breadth that the earlier stages could not yet supply. This progression is real and consequential, yet the conventional currency of recognition — publications and citations — captures almost none of it. Recognising career-stage progression requires a different instrument: a structured way to describe the capabilities a researcher develops and the stages they move through. Researcher development frameworks provide exactly this, and they are the subject of this article, which draws on the mentorship and career-stages domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    The problem with output-counting

    The dominance of output metrics has a hidden cost for careers. If recognition flows mainly to those with long publication lists and high citation counts, then the many capabilities that make a good researcher — the ability to design rigorous studies, to communicate, to collaborate, to manage, to supervise, to develop others — go largely unrewarded, and the people at earlier career stages, who have had less time to accumulate outputs, are systematically disadvantaged. Worse, output-counting tells you nothing about development: two researchers with identical publication lists may differ enormously in their independence, leadership and range. A system that cannot see growth cannot fairly support, develop or promote the people within it. Frameworks that describe capability and progression exist to correct this blindness.

    The Vitae Researcher Development Framework

    The best-known instrument of this kind is the Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF). The RDF sets out the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of effective researchers, organised into domains that span far more than research technique alone — covering knowledge and intellectual abilities, personal effectiveness, research governance and organisation, and engagement, influence and impact. Its value lies in making the full breadth of researcher capability explicit and nameable. Instead of leaving “development” as a vague aspiration, the RDF gives institutions, supervisors and researchers themselves a shared map: a way to identify which capabilities a researcher has, which they are developing, and where their growth might next be directed. It can structure training provision, inform appraisal and self-assessment, and give early-career researchers a language for articulating what they have learned beyond the papers they have published. The framework turns development from something assumed into something that can be described and supported.

    The Concordat and the institutional duty

    Frameworks describe capability; policy creates the obligation to develop it. In the United Kingdom, the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers sets out the responsibilities of institutions, funders and researchers towards researcher development. It commits signatory organisations to providing environments and opportunities that support researchers’ growth — including dedicated time for professional development, support for career progression, and recognition of researchers as professionals with careers, not merely as a source of labour for projects. The Concordat matters because it places development on an institutional footing: it is not left to the goodwill of individual supervisors but becomes a commitment that organisations make and report against. Together, a capability framework like the RDF and a policy commitment like the Concordat form a system in which development is both describable and expected.

    Recognising supervision and mentoring

    A particular and often neglected dimension of career-stage progression is the work of developing others. Supervising doctoral students and mentoring early-career colleagues is demanding, skilled and central to the health of the research enterprise — yet it has traditionally been among the least recognised activities in academic careers. Efforts to address this include the work of bodies such as the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE), whose recognition arrangements for research supervisors affirm supervision as a professional practice with its own standards and development path. Recognising supervision properly does two things at once: it values the labour of those who do it, and it acknowledges that the ability to supervise well is itself a marker of career-stage progression — a capability the researcher has developed. Frameworks that name supervision and mentoring as recognised contributions help bring this work out of the shadows.

    The narrative CV as the vehicle

    If development and capability are what we want to recognise, the traditional CV — a reverse-chronological list of outputs and posts — is a poor vehicle for showing them. The narrative CV has emerged as a better fit. Instead of merely listing publications, a narrative CV asks the researcher to describe their contributions and their development in prose: what they have contributed to knowledge, to the research community, to the development of others, to broader society. This format is well suited to career-stage recognition because it lets a researcher tell the story of their growth — the capabilities they have built, the people they have developed, the responsibilities they have taken on — rather than reducing their career to a count. The narrative CV and the development framework are natural partners: the framework supplies the vocabulary of capability, and the narrative CV supplies the form in which a researcher can demonstrate it.

    A consistent vocabulary for development and contribution

    For development and progression to be recognised consistently — across institutions, funders and the systems that record careers — the way contributions and capabilities are described must mean the same thing everywhere. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that a contribution described in one place is understood the same way in another. The structured description of who did what, captured by the CRediT taxonomy, complements the developmental picture by recording specific contributions to specific works, which a narrative CV can then draw on and interpret. To explore how these instruments fit together in practice, see our broader material on learning and the wider research-administration record. Counting outputs tells you what a researcher has produced; development frameworks tell you who they have become — and a fair research culture needs to recognise both.