The academic curriculum vitae (CV) plays a critical role in a researcher’s career, including hiring decisions, funding, and academic awards. The traditional CV that includes all publications is list-based and unstructured, making it difficult to interpret and compare, and it emphasizes publications over other types of academic achievements and quantity of publications over quality.

Funding agencies have, therefore, begun to pilot free-text CVs, where applicants describe their achievements in their own words, and other alternative formats. In 2019, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Bern, launched SciCV—a new, standardized CV format—to encourage fair, DORA-compliant assessment of grant applicants.

SciCV is neither list-based nor purely free-text-based, but intends to combine the best of both worlds. The SNSF tested SciCV in one funding round and had it evaluated by an independent research group from Leiden University’s Centre for Science Technology Studies (CWTS Leiden), The Netherlands. As a result, they developed an adapted version, SciCV 2.0, which the SNSF plans to introduce for all funding instruments in the fall of 2022. In addition, continuous monitoring is planned to enable SciCV to be improved incrementally.

The adapted format continues to combine free-text and list-based elements. It includes the elements of the SciCV pilot that were highly rated and omitted less popular ones. The elements rated as useful include a section in which applicants are asked to describe their major contributions to science in four narratives of 200 words each, and the academic age, which indicates the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) years an applicant has worked in science, starting with the first academic publication rather than from graduation.

• SciCV, the Swiss National Science Foundation’s new CV format,
  Michaela Strinzel, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Inge van der Weijden, Martin von Arx, Michael Hill,
  bioRxiv 2022.
  https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.16.484596

  This research has been published as a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed.