How to write an academic CV

A complete, well-ordered record of your research, funding, teaching and service, with every citation in one consistent style.

An academic CV is a complete record of your scholarly work. Unlike a résumé or an industry CV, it isn’t trimmed to one or two pages: it lists every publication, grant, talk and course you’ve taught, and it grows over a career. A PhD student’s might be three pages; a professor’s can run to twenty or more. That’s normal, and you shouldn’t cut real items to make it shorter.

What a reader on a hiring or promotion committee needs is to find things quickly, so the work is in the structure and the consistency.

Tip: Some job ads and funders ask for a “short CV”, set a page limit or require a narrative CV in their own format. Always follow those instructions, and keep a full version separately. The full CV is your master copy; short versions are selections from it.

Section order

There’s no single correct order, and fields differ. A common structure for early-career researchers:

1. Contact details (institutional email, department, ORCID iD if you have one, personal website)
2. Current position (or “Education” first if you’re a doctoral student)
3. Education (degrees, institution, year, thesis title, supervisor)
4. Academic appointments
5. Publications
6. Grants, fellowships and funding
7. Awards and honours
8. Conference presentations and invited talks
9. Teaching
10. Supervision and mentoring
11. Service (reviewing, committees, organising)
12. Professional memberships
13. Skills (methods, languages, software), if relevant
14. Referees

Adjust to your strengths and the job. For a teaching-focused post, move Teaching up. For a research fellowship, Publications and Grants come straight after Education. Within each section, list items in reverse chronological order.

Publications

This is the section readers check first in most fields, so make it easy to scan.

Split by type. Typical subsections:

• Peer-reviewed journal articles
• Books and monographs
• Book chapters
• Conference proceedings (in fields such as computer science, these are often the main peer-reviewed outlet)
• Preprints and working papers
• Other publications (reviews, reports, public writing)

Use clear status labels, and use them honestly:

Keep “in preparation” items in their own clearly labelled subsection, or leave them out. Listing a draft among published work will be noticed, and it costs credibility.

Make your name easy to find. Bold your name in each author list, and if your field uses author-order conventions (first author, last author as senior, alphabetical), consider a short note explaining them. Mark equal contribution with a symbol and a key.

Add identifiers. A DOI for each item helps readers check it. An ORCID iD at the top links to your full record.

Citation style: pick one, use it everywhere

Use the citation style common in your field (for example APA in psychology, Chicago in history, a numbered style in many sciences), and apply it to every entry. Inconsistent formatting is a very common problem on academic CVs, and readers in your field will spot it.

Suppose your CV already lists this entry in APA style:

Okafor, A., & Lind, M. (2024). Soil carbon in restored peatland. Journal of Wetland Science, 12(3), 201–219. https://doi.org/10.0000/example.2024.012

Then an older entry pasted in from somewhere else needs converting to match:

Before: M. Lind, A. Okafor, “Drainage legacy effects on peat,” J. Wetl. Sci. vol 10, 2022, pp 45-60

After: Lind, M., & Okafor, A. (2022). Drainage legacy effects on peat. Journal of Wetland Science, 10(1), 45–60. https://doi.org/10.0000/example.2022.004

(The names, journal and DOIs above are invented for illustration.)

Things to check across every entry: author name format, year position, title capitalisation, italics for journal or book titles, volume and issue format, page range dashes and DOI format. A reference manager can export a consistent list, but check the output by eye.

Grants and funding

For each grant, give:

• funder and scheme
• title of the project
• your role (Principal Investigator, Co-Investigator, named researcher)
• amount, with currency, and whether it’s the total award or your share
• dates

2024 to 2026. Northshire Research Council, Early Career Scheme. "Restoring carbon in lowland peat." Principal Investigator. £148,000 (total award).

Include unsuccessful applications only if your field or the job asks for them (some promotion processes do). Small awards, such as travel grants, can go in a separate “Travel and small grants” list.

Teaching

List what you taught, at what level, your role and the size, so a reader can judge your load and range:

Lecturer, Environmental Data Analysis (second-year undergraduate, 120 students), 2023 to 2025. Designed and delivered 10 lectures and weekly R workshops; module lead in 2025.

Teaching assistant, Introduction to Ecology (first-year, seminar groups of 15), 2020 to 2022.

Add teaching qualifications (for example, a postgraduate certificate in higher education or a fellowship of a teaching body) and, if you have them, a line of evaluation results. Don’t overstate: “guest lecture” and “module lead” are very different.

Conferences and talks

Separate invited talks from contributed presentations, as invited talks carry more weight. For each, give title, event, place and date, and mark the format (talk or poster). If the list is long, a reader is helped by a split by year or by type.

Service

Peer reviewing (list journals, not individual papers), editorial roles, committees, organising workshops, outreach. Short lines are fine here.

Things to leave out

• Personal details such as date of birth and marital status, in countries where they aren’t expected (see personal details).
• A “summary” in the industry style. Academic CVs usually don’t have one; your cover letter and research statement do that job.
• Padding: listing the same talk three times, or every seminar you attended.

Formatting

Use a clean serif or sans font, clear section headings, and page numbers with your name on each page. Hanging indents for publication lists make them easier to scan. The Academic template is a multi-page serif layout; add publications, grants and teaching as custom sections with those plain headings; the Ledger template is a more traditional alternative if you want a shorter CV for a non-academic or industry-facing application.

Keep your master CV up to date as things happen. Adding a paper when it’s accepted takes a minute; reconstructing three years of talks the night before a deadline takes an evening.

Next: if you’re moving from academia into industry, read the one-page résumé and tailoring your CV.