How to write an academic CV

An academic CV is a different document from the one or two pages used for most jobs. A business CV is kept short and sells your impact; an academic CV runs as long as it needs to and sets out your scholarly record in full. Mix up the two and you will look thin for an academic post or overwhelming for an industry one.

The same rules apply, in a shorter form, when a scholarship or PhD programme asks for an “academic CV”. At that stage your record may fit on two pages, but the reader is still looking for the same things.

What committees use it for

Search committees use the CV to judge your record against the demands of a research or teaching post. They are looking at your qualifications, research, publications, teaching and standing in the field, and the CV should present that evidence clearly, in the order that counts most for the job in question.

Scholarship and admissions panels read it in a similar way, with more weight on education, research experience and any awards, because that is most of what an early-career applicant has.

Sections

Most academic CVs are built from a familiar set of sections:

• contact details and a line or two summarising your field and focus
• education, with degrees in reverse order and your PhD topic and supervisor
• research experience: positions, projects and the methods or areas you worked in
• publications in a consistent citation style, divided into peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, conference papers and work in progress
• funding and awards, including grants, scholarships and prizes, with amounts and dates where relevant
• teaching: courses, levels, your role and any supervision
• conferences and talks, including invited talks and posters
• service, such as peer review, committee work and professional memberships

Not every CV needs every section, and an early-career researcher’s will be shorter. Include what you have and leave out what you do not. An empty “Publications” heading followed by nothing helps no one; a “Work in progress” entry for a paper you are actively writing is fine if it is accurate.

What the entries look like

The detail inside each section matters as much as the headings. This illustrative extract, for an invented applicant to a PhD programme, shows the level of detail that helps a reader.

1. 1Thesis title and supervisor: both matter to an academic reader. The title shows your topic; the supervisor's name places you in the field.
2. 2Methods and scale: what you did, with which technique and how much of it. A reader judging a research applicant wants to know what you can already do.
3. 3Full citation, your name in bold: the complete reference in one consistent style, so the reader can find it and see your position in the author list.
4. 4Status stated plainly: "in preparation", "submitted" or "under review" only when it is true. Never list a submitted paper as accepted.

Our academic CV template gives you this layout to fill in.

Ordering for the post

The most useful change you can make is to put first whatever the post values most. Read the job description or the award criteria, work out what the readers care about and arrange the sections to answer that first. If your strongest material is on page four, most readers will not get that far.

Applying for	Put near the top	Can move lower
A research-heavy post or fellowship	Research experience, publications, funding	Teaching, service
A teaching-focused post	Teaching, courses designed, supervision	Detailed list of conference posters
A PhD place or research scholarship	Education, thesis, research experience, any publications	Service and memberships
A taught Masters scholarship	Education, awards, relevant work or projects	Conferences, if you have few

Education usually stays near the top whatever the post, because it is the first thing most academic readers check. The other sections are what you rearrange.

Conferences and talks

List conference papers and posters with the title, the name of the event, the city and the date, and mark which were oral presentations and which posters. Invited talks deserve their own heading if you have more than one, since an invitation says something about your standing. For early-career applicants, a departmental seminar or student conference counts; label it accurately rather than leaving it out.

Mistakes to watch for

Do not cut your publication list to save space as you would on a business CV, because in academia the detail is the point. Use one citation format throughout; inconsistency looks like carelessness about your own work. And adjust the CV for each application, since one sent unchanged to every post suggests you have not thought about the role.

Keeping it up to date

Update the CV as things happen, so you are not rebuilding it against a deadline. A talk accepted, a paper submitted, a module taught: add it the same week, while the dates and titles are in front of you. Clear headings, consistent formatting and enough white space make it easy to scan. An academic CV can be long, but it should never be hard to read.

If you are also applying for jobs outside academia, keep a separate, shorter version built to different rules; our guide to writing a CV that gets shortlisted covers that one.