Is the narrative CV dead already?

The narrative CV was supposed to be the great equaliser. A chance to move beyond the blunt metrics of h-indices, publication counts, and journal impact factors. A chance for researchers to tell a story. This would help bring to life the messy, non-linear, deeply human realities of a career in academia. On paper, the idea was noble. In practice, I suspect something else has happened entirely. I say suspect, because I am not aware of any research that has assessed whether the narrative CV has improved or hindered progress to date.

The Promise

When UKRI and other major funders began rolling out narrative CVs, the rationale was compelling. Traditional CVs had long been criticised for rewarding a narrow definition of academic success: more papers, bigger grants, higher-ranked journals. This format systematically disadvantaged early career researchers, those who had taken career breaks, researchers working in applied or interdisciplinary fields, and anyone whose contributions didn't fit neatly into a list. One might even argue that traditional academic CVs are a rather lazy demonstration of an individual's contributions.

The narrative CV was designed to fix this. Instead of listing outputs, academics describe their contributions. This can help contextualise career gaps or foreground mentorship, public engagement, team science, and knowledge exchange. In other words, the labour that keeps research ecosystems functioning but rarely appears on a traditional CV (although of course it can in practice).

As someone who has spent years working across disciplinary boundaries, from computational social science to policy engagement, I should be exactly the kind of researcher a narrative CV was built for. Much of what I do doesn't reduce neatly to a publication list. For selfish reasons, I would like the narrative CV to work.

The playing field, we were told, would be levelled.

The Reality

Except it wasn't. I suspect all narrative CVs have done is hand a megaphone to those who already had the most to shout about.

Consider the mechanics. A senior researcher with 25 years of experience, hundreds of publications, and a constellation of grants doesn't just have more content for a narrative CV - they have more narrative. More threads to weave. More stories to tell. More collaborations to frame as leadership, more outputs to contextualise as impact, more career choices to recast as strategic vision. The narrative format doesn't constrain this advantage; it amplifies it.

Worse, the narrative format creates room for what I might politely call generous interpretation. A middle author on a paper with 20 authors becomes a "key intellectual contributor." A project that evolved organically becomes one that was "strategically initiated." A grant that funded a team of twenty becomes evidence of personal "research leadership," whereas in practice, they never met or mentored any members of that team. Traditional CVs, for all their crudeness, may force a brutal honesty. Your name was either on a paper or it wasn't, and a position in the author list told its own story. If a reader really wants to know, they can check a credit statement on a paper regardless of the CV type. A narrative CV loosens these constraints and replaces them with prose, and prose is a medium that can reward confidence over accuracy. Case in point, the prose used by some scientists to suggest that there will be benefits by banning social media for under 16’s is based on prose, not evidence, and yet the discussion continues! 

I have no idea whether this is a minor or major problem. However, it likely means that the people best positioned to over-hedge their contributions, for example, those with long careers, extensive networks, and no ideas, are precisely the people the narrative CV gives the most room to do so. Meanwhile, an early career researcher with three years of postdoctoral experience, a handful of papers, and brilliant ideas has less to contextualise, and frankly less to embellish. The format that was supposed to help them may have instead widened the gap. Having reviewed grant applications and sat on panels, I have seen firsthand how a well-constructed narrative can make modest contributions sound transformational, while genuinely innovative work from less experienced applicants can come across as thin simply because there is less career experience to draw on.

The Structural Problem

There is a deeper issue here, and it is one of assessment culture rather than CV format. The narrative CV assumed that the problem with research evaluation was presentational. If we just changed how people described their work, reviewers would assess it more fairly. But the problem was never really about format. It was about what we value.

If panels still implicitly reward volume, seniority, and prestige, then it doesn't matter whether those things are presented in a bulleted list or a flowing paragraph. The narrative CV changed the container without changing the contents of the evaluation. And in doing so, it may have made things harder to assess fairly, because the signals that reviewers relied on, imperfect as they were, became further obscured behind carefully crafted prose. Which, of course, can now be written by AI with almost no effort.

Panel members now face a different challenge: evaluating not just the quality of someone's research, but the quality of their writing about their research. This introduces a new and largely unacknowledged source of bias. Researchers who write well, who have experience crafting grant applications, and who have had the mentorship and time to learn the art of academic self-promotion, will flourish in a narrative format. Those who haven't had those advantages do not.

What Should Have Happened

The instinct behind the narrative CV was right. Research evaluation is far too narrow, too focused on metrics, and too punishing of non-traditional career paths. But the solution was never to ask people to write better stories about themselves. The solution was to change what counts as a story worth telling.

This means structural reform: funding panels that genuinely weight mentorship and supervision; assessment criteria that recognise team contributions without requiring individuals to claim them as personal achievements; evaluation frameworks that treat career breaks and part-time work as context rather than deficit. It means training reviewers to assess contributions rather than narratives and creating accountability for how those assessments are made.

It also means being honest about the limitations of self-report. Any format that asks people to describe their own contributions will favour those who are most practiced at or more comfortable with self-promotion. If the goal is equity, the answer is not to give everyone the same blank page and hope for the best. It is to build systems that balance the advantages that seniority, confidence, and institutional privilege confer.

Not Dead Yet

The narrative CV is not yet dead, but it is dying the slow death of a well-intentioned policy that failed to reckon with the system it was trying to reform. It confused a change in format with a culture change, and in doing so, it gave those with the longest CVs not just more to say, but more room to say it and more room to say it generously.

If we are serious about levelling the playing field in research assessment, we might need to stop tinkering with templates and start dismantling the structural advantages that make the field uneven in the first place. The narrative CV may have taught us something valuable: you cannot narrate your way to equity.

Then again, there is an irony worth acknowledging. The same generative AI that can now polish a narrative CV with little effort might eventually be the thing that levels the playing field after all, by giving those who are not natural self-promoters the tools to articulate their contributions just as fluently as anyone else. If that happens, my argument could be turned completely on its head!