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Academic CV tips and tricks
An effective CV is more than a series of lists outlining your achievements
Follow these tips to avoid common errors in writing your CV.
Key takeaways
Opening your CV (Curriculum Vitae) with a short career summary can help you shape the narrative around you and your research.
Include introductory paragraphs before sections to highlight your key achievements and contextualise what is listed.
List items in reverse chronological order to highlight your most recent achievements first.
Make sure your publications are presented clearly. Use consistent formatting, distinguish between publication type, and bold your name in the references so it stands out.
Introducing yourself
Some people start their CV with a career summary – typically a paragraph. This can put you in control of the narrative. You can explain who you are and what you specialise in, where your career has come from, what you’re currently focusing on, your goals and which direction(s) you want to take things… and anything else of significance. Essentially you use this kind of introduction to tell readers how to think about you. Just be cautious it contains meaningful information and isn’t too long – you don’t want it to look like ‘padding’.
When producing a targeted CV to apply for a specific job, grant, prize etc., this career summary is an obvious section to revise to suit the purpose and audience.
Using a combination of paragraphs and lists
Even when the information is neatly organised into sensible categories, many CVs amount to little more than pages of lists. While lists are very helpful for presenting lots of details, or data points, they can be tedious and time consuming to read. Lists are also like a join-the-dots picture: the reader decides how to connect the dots, not you. In other words, you’re not in control of the narrative; the reader is.
Introductory paragraphs
A better approach is to preface each list with a short introductory paragraph. This paragraph gives you the opportunity to (i) provide a succinct summary of what’s in the list, which helps the reader, and (ii) offer some narrative, or explanation, about what the list means in the context of your career.
Let’s take publications as an example. You might have a list of 35 publications. You could preface this with a paragraph as follows:
I have produced 35 publications comprising 28 peer-reviewed journal articles, 5 books chapters and 2 reports. I am first author on 12 publications and in the last 2 years have taken the senior-author role on 4, reflecting the recent establishment of my own team. My work has been cited 782 times (Scopus) and my h-index is 11.
There’s more you might say, of course, but don’t turn it into a treatise!
Effective Lists
Elaborating on items in lists
Lists are a succinct way to convey information, but sometimes they can be too succinct. Imagine you’re not from the University and you read this in someone’s CV:
- Awarded Sydney Research Accelerator (SOAR) prize (2021-2022)
How informative is that? Now compare this:
- Awarded Sydney Research Accelerator (SOAR) prize (2021-2022). These two-year prizes ($50k per year) support innovative research by outstanding University of Sydney early- and mid-career researchers. (Success rate: n%; or n awarded per year)
You don’t need to elaborate on every item in every list; in fact, many things will be self-explanatory. So, be selective.
Listing items in reverse chronological order
In general, the people who read your CV will be more interested in your recent achievements than in things you did many years ago. It is therefore standard practice to use reverse chronology in lists – that is, start with the most recent and work backwards.
Providing dates
Trying to trace someone’s career path when no dates are given is virtually impossible. In fact what usually happens is that dates are provided for some things but not for others – seemingly randomly. You should provide dates for everything. Usually the year(s) will suffice, but there may be occasions when it’s helpful to provide the month as well (e.g. conference presentations) and even the day (e.g. a news story about your research).
Presenting dates consistently
It’s helpful if you present dates in a consistent way. Often the approach is, again, random, like this:
- Young Tall Poppy Award for 2023
- Sydney Research Accelerator (SOAR) prize (2021-2022)
- 2020 VC’s Supervisor of the Year Award
It’s easier to follow if you do this:
- Young Tall Poppy Award (2023)
- Sydney Research Accelerator (SOAR) prize (2021-2022)
- VC’s Supervisor of the Year Award (2020)
Or even better is this:
2023 Young Tall Poppy Award
2021-22 Sydney Research Accelerator (SOAR) prize
2020 VC’s Supervisor of the Year Award
Describing grants, prizes and awards
Identify the source
The organisation and/or scheme from which you obtain a grant, prize or award, can say something about the kind of research you do. For example, industry funding suggests your research has the potential for commercial application. Philanthropic funding suggests your research may have community benefits – local, national or global, depending on the funder. The source also matters in terms of prestige. For example, ARC (Australian Research Council) funding is considered far more prestigious than University funding. This is because it is nationally competitive.
Indicate if it is competitive
This probably isn’t necessary for major prizes, such as Eureka or Tall Poppy, or for major funding schemes, such as ARC and NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council), because it’s common knowledge that they’re competitive. (However, international readers may be unaware of these prizes and schemes.) But if you’ve won, say, a Robinson Fellowship from the University, outsiders may never have heard of it. So, explain that it’s competitive. Better still, state the success rate, if you know it.
Explain what it is for and/or why you received it
If you won an award or grant for a research project, it may be sufficient explanation just to state the project’s title. But there may be other details worth mentioning - for example, the project may have involved an important national or international collaboration. If a prize or award is in recognition of a special achievement, such as research supervision or research impact, explain what you did.
State your role/position
It’s imperative to state your role/position on a grant, such as CIA (Chief Investigator A), CID (Chief Investigator Director), co-CI, lead CI, PI (Principal Investigator), AI (Associate Investigator). (This applies also to team prizes and awards.) If you preface your list of grants with an introductory paragraph, it’s common practice to state the total number and/or value of all your grants, and then to state, as a subset, the number and/or value of the grants that you led.
Include the full range of years
If, for example, you won a 3-year grant that started in 2019, don’t state only ‘2019’, the year it was awarded. State that the grant was for ‘2019-2021’.
Do or don’t include the $ value?
Yes, you should list the total $ value of all your grants combined. You might also choose to break this down into subtotals for different categories of funding, such as ‘industry funding’, ‘ARC funding’, ‘Category 1 funding’ – whatever works to your advantage.
Don’t ‘bury’ fellowships
Fellowships are a special kind of grant, as much a reward for an outstanding track record as an award for an exciting, innovative project proposal; and they are held in considerable esteem. For this reason, you don’t want to bury a fellowship halfway down a list of grants where someone skim-reading your CV might miss it. Put it in the spotlight. You might, for example, include it as a kind of honorific, e.g. ‘Dr Cynthia Smith, ARC Future Fellow’. Alternatively, you might include it in Positions (at the start of a CV) rather than in Grants (which come later). Or perhaps do a combination: introduce yourself as ‘Dr Cynthia Smith, ARC Future Fellow’, and then under Grants provide the details of the fellowship, e.g. years, dollar value, and title of the associated project.
Don’t include applications that were unsuccessful
Lack of success is never something you want to draw attention to. It’s widely understood that researchers – even the most successful – do not win every time, but these failures should not be recorded in your CV. However, as an ECR you may be wanting to spruik the fact that you helped write an application for a major grant, prize or award. If so, talk about this in a different context, perhaps as a skill you have acquired. There is no need to reveal that the application you helped write was not actually successful.
Don’t include grants unless you are a named investigator
Even if you helped write a successful grant application, you should not claim the funding as your own unless you are officially named as an investigator on the grant (e.g. as a CI, PI, or AI). This is a widely-accepted convention. Contravening it will be perceived as a form of cheating.
Describing presentations
Similar to grants, prizes and awards, you should provide plenty of detail about any presentations you give at conferences, seminars, workshops or other kinds of meeting. Points to cover could include:
the title, location and date
the type of presentation (e.g. keynote, plenary, poster, seminar)
whether you were invited
whether your costs of travel and/or accommodation were covered
your role, if you were one of a team giving the presentation.
As the number of your presentations grows, you might also consider having subsections for International or National.
Presenting publications
There are, of course, many different types of publications; and you may wish to include publications that are at different stages of the publishing process, but make this status very clear (e.g. under review, accepted for publication, in press). The guiding principle is simple: present and explain everything clearly.
Organise your publications so they are easy to read
You might arrange your publications by year, by publication type (e.g. books, book chapters, journal articles), or by type first and year second. See example on the right.
As your publication list grows, you may also want to subdivide publication types further, e.g. sole-authored books, edited books, original research articles, review articles.
Make sure your name stands out
If your publications are co-authored, you want your name to be easily discernible amongst the list of authors. Bold or ALL CAPS are usually best for this.
Include ORCID
An Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a unique identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and will link readers to a list of your publications online, providing substantiating evidence of what’s presented in your CV. It’s helpful to include this at the start of your publications list, giving readers the option to use it. Your ORCID is particularly useful if you have to submit an abridged CV (e.g. two or five pages) which doesn’t allow enough room for all your publications. If, for example, you have room for only 10 publications, your ORCID will enable readers to quickly look up the rest of your publications, should they wish.
Using metrics
There are myriad citation metrics. The question is: which ones, and how many, should you use? For advice about specific metrics, and to request your own Citation Metrics Report, contact the library. Here, we offer three general principles:
Avoid using too many metrics
Saying the same thing in multiple different ways is not helpful. You might argue, of course, that all metrics are subtly different; but while that subtlety might matter to you, ask yourself whether it will really matter to your reader. Most readers will not wish to be bogged down in the technical differences between, say, your article’s field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) and its field citation ratio (FCR).
Use metrics consistently
If you start out using Scopus citations, don’t suddenly switch to Google Scholar halfway through. If you want to use FWCI for some articles, then you should use it for all. The inconsistent use of metrics looks either careless or suspect, like you’re trying to hide something.
Choose the metrics that work best for you
The previous point doesn’t mean you should consistently use metrics that make the impact of your publications look dreadful. With a Citation Metrics Report from the library (or create your own) you can decide which metrics work best for you overall. For example, even if your Altmetrics score is not great for every publication, if it looks impressive on average across all your publications, then it would be worth using.
Should you include a ‘Top 5’ or ‘Top 10’ publications section?
Most publication lists simply provide the full citation details for each publication; they don’t offer any explanatory commentary. In the track records section of a grant you’ll often be asked to provide a narrative around your Top 5 or Top 10 publications. Some people are introducing a separate section in their CV where they discuss a handful of their publications (usually 5 or 10) that are considered to be the most significant. If you choose to do this, your commentary for each chosen publication should be brief, not an essay. For information on how to write a commentary, see Writing about your top 10 articles.