The Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) introduced a standardized narrative-style CV format in 2021 as a requirement for applicants to all of FNR’s funding schemes. This new format was introduced to streamline and simplify the evaluation process, broaden the types of contributions considered during review, and to align with DORA’s principles that research should be assessed on its own merits.
FNR implemented a narrative CV to support fair evaluation of applicants that takes into account practices related to ethical research, Open Science, and contributions to science and society. To ensure iterative improvement of their guidance and the usability of the new CV format, FNR actively surveyed users and evaluated the reception of the new CV format. Feedback from their users is summarized in their report: Narrative CV – Implementation and Feedback Results. The raw data are available in this link.
Highlights from the survey:
- Participants included 148 applicants to FNR programmes and 309 reviewers.
- There was a general acceptance of the new CV format, which has remained generally positive for the past two years
- Applicants showed general agreement that the narrative CV format provided them the space to demonstrate wider range of achievements
- The majority of the reviewers provided a positive outlook on the narrative CV’s usefulness in evaluation, with no differences in difficulty or time of evaluation compared to a traditional CV.
- Overall results showed that both researchers and evaluators were in favour of the narrative CV format.