If you work in an academic field, you need to have a stellar curriculum vitae or CV. A lot goes into the academic CV format, with plenty of dos and don'ts that reviewers expect to see followed. Each section of the CV provides space for this or that important information, and getting it all right can be confusing, even to a scientist or scholar.
What is the Proper Format of a CV? 7 Critical Sections
These are the sections most commonly found in the CV format and notes on how to structure them for the review panel at your next university.
1. Contact Information
This section should be neatly arranged and easy to read. Important elements to include here are your contact numbers, email address, and a location where you can send and receive mail. In lieu of your personal mailing address, you can just name the institution you’re currently working at, which is usually enough to get letters to your desk.
2. Education History
Employers insist on a strict CV format in this section, and there’s not much room for deviation from it. Most want to see you start here with your highest degree and work backward to your undergraduate work. Use common terms such as PhD rather than spelling titles out. You can skip your start dates but be sure to include your completion dates. If the ink is still drying on your doctorate, you can list your advisor and/or the title of your dissertation. If you finished your degree more than a year ago, however, it’s best to just leave that out.
3. Professional Experience
This section helps reviewers place you at a glance, and it should only include your professional work experience. TA jobs and adjunct positions shouldn’t appear here. Skip mentions of your short-term work as well — try only to mention work you’ve done under contracts that lasted at least one year.
If you have experience as an instructor or — better still — a tenure-track position, this is the place for it in a typical CV format. You can also include your postdoc experience. If you’re applying for an ABD position, you may not have anything that fits here, and your reviewer will understand if you leave the whole section out.
4. Publication Record
Academics in most fields live and die by their publication records, and this is the section where you can really shine. List your past papers in reverse-chronological order by title, reference number, and date of publication.
If your latest paper has been accepted for publication but it’s not out yet, you can put “in press” for the date. It's a good idea to stick to papers you’ve published in respected, peer-reviewed journals here. Remember that most STEM and humanities departments only want to see what you’ve gotten through peer review or a university press.
If you’ve been working for a while in your field, you could have an extensive publication record. If it runs on for a bit, and especially if you’ve published in different media, try grouping your work under headings such as:
- Books you’ve written and volumes you’ve edited, such as anthologies
- Conference proceedings
- Contributions you may have made to encyclopedias
- Reviews you’ve written
- Online-only work you’ve published
5. Awards and Recognition
List the awards you’ve won just as you’ve listed everything else: in reverse chronology with the year and name of the award, along with the awarding institution, if applicable. If you have a really prestigious award under your belt, such as the Nobel Prize, go ahead and list that one first.
You may or may not want to list the cash award that came with your prize. Because that varies so much between fields — from “never do this” to “make sure they know” — it’s a good idea to check with an experienced colleague beforehand.
6. Grants and Fellowships
This section should be as similar as possible to the Awards and Recognition section above it. It’s usually formatted the same way, and it lists the granting bodies that have funded your research. Again, listing the cash value of the grant is sometimes acceptable and sometimes not, so check before you do this. Be sure to include the year the grant was awarded and the duration.
7. Talks and Papers Presented
If researchers in your field answer calls for papers, you’ve probably been invited to give talks at other campuses. This is the section for listing those, starting with any you’ve been accepted to but haven’t yet attended. Work your way back to the first presentation you’ve given but leave out the talks that were organized by your own institution; those go in the next section.
If your latest paper has been accepted for publication but it’s not out yet, you can put “in press” for the date. It's a good idea to stick to papers you’ve published in respected, peer-reviewed journals here. Remember that most STEM and humanities departments only want to see what you’ve gotten through peer review or a university press.
Additional CV Sections to Consider
Different types of professionals may include additional sections on their CVs other than the seven critical sections listed above. Depending on the job title you are applying for and your past work experience, you may want to consider adding one or more of the following sections to your CV.
Departmental Lectures
This section is for talks you’ve given on your own campus. Be sure to include the dates. Keep in mind that nowhere in your CV format is there space for guest lectures or times you’ve filled in for a colleague by taking over a class session. Those are never listed on a CV, and padding your history with those could hurt your chances of getting a callback.
CV Format for Listing Teaching Experience
Many academics have teaching experience, so this section usually isn’t an exhaustive list of every teaching gig you’ve ever held. Rather, you can list your experience as an adjunct or TA with the institution and the date range included. Use the name of the course, but not its number, which is probably unique to your institution.
If you’ve taught a course multiple times, the best practice is to just list multiple dates in parentheses, rather than padding the section with multiple entries. It’s best to keep each entry as sparse as possible, because space is limited and most reviewers can guess what a class covered by its name.
The big exception to this rule is if one of your teaching jobs came with extra duties that could be relevant. An example of this would be a class where you were technically a TA but the professor let you design the lessons and teach it by yourself. In that case, the fewer words you can use to convey your extra responsibilities, the better, but it’s nice to have it noted.
Research
This is, oddly, the section that most reads like a nonacademic resume. List your research projects and lab experience as if you were describing any other job. Because research varies so much, even within fields, you can give each entry a sentence or two of elaboration to get across a sense of what you were up to.
Professional Service
Most research is collaborative, and reviewers want to know that you’re a team player. By listing the conferences you’ve helped organize and the miscellaneous housekeeping duties you’ve performed (such as editing professional journals or compiling anthologies), you can show them how helpful you’ve been to past teams you’ve worked with and to the field at large.
Departmental Service: An Exception to the Format of a CV
In this section, you have the opportunity to list all departmental (or university) groups, committees, or task forces on which you served or held a leadership role. If you have little to no work experience, adding student groups you’ve been involved in are valid in this section as well. If you have assumed a leadership role or performed administrative duties in these roles, be sure to mention that.
This section is formatted a bit differently than other sections of your CV in that in this section the titles of events you’ve organized or led are left-justified. The dates, which you have been listing to the left up to this point, go to the right of each entry here. This is oddly specific and almost universal across fields, so if you’ve been on your university’s search committee or you’ve been a faculty advisor, it’s a rule you should probably follow.
