Promoting narrative CVs to improve research evaluation? A review of opinion pieces and experiments

As the academic community has become increasingly concerned about the drifts of research evaluation, mostly researchers’ evaluation, because of the overreliance on metrics, many expert groups have made recommendations to improve the way researchers should be evaluated. In this study, we focus on the recommendation to use narrative curriculum vitae (CVs). We review 28 opinion pieces and 7 experiments to better understand what a narrative CV can refer to, and to explore whether the narrative function that is specific to this kind of CV is proving effective in response to the concerns raised by evaluation practices. A close reading of these documents reveals the conceptual basis of the narrative CV and the problems it is intended to solve; we propose five commonly reported features of the narrative CV: avoid lists, contextualize achievements, fight metrics, enlarge the spectrum of contributions taken into consideration and foster diversity and inclusion. But the promoters of the narrative CV pay little to investigate how the narrative feature itself can lead to any benefits. However, the feedback collected from both applicants and evaluators is quite positive. Regardless of whether it is justified or not, the enthusiasm aroused by the implementation of this new type of CV undeniably has the advantage of opening up the debate, raising awareness and calling to question the bad practices and biases that exist in the researchers’ assessment processes. The narrative nature of the CV is, in the end, just a pretext for raising interest and working towards the adoption of good practices.