In an effort to improve the evaluation of CVs, the SNSF will run a pilot programme to test a new, standardised CV format called SciCV. The pilot concerns all applicants for project funding in biology and medicine in this year’s first call for proposals (submission deadline 01 April 2020). All applicants participating in this call, are required to submit their CV in the new format as part of their application.
At present, the formats of CVs submitted by applicants are heterogeneous and not always in line with international best practice. The aim of SciCV is to remedy this situation by allowing researchers to compile their CV in a structured way and to present their most important contributions to science in brief narratives, rather than only as lists of publications. This approach will help make other academic outputs, beyond publications, visible and valued and promote equal opportunities. SciCV will also introduce a uniform way of calculating the academic age of applicants, which indicates how long they have been active researchers as opposed to their biological age. The new format will no longer include any journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles. Rather, the actual content of articles and their citation impact will be considered.
To simplify the completion of CVs, the SNSF has created this interactive online toolkit (www.scicv.ch), which will be available to all applicants in biology and medicine as of 1 March 2020 through to 1 April 2020. Applicants will require an ORCID account to log in and to access the relevant data entry fields. Creating the SciCV online is a straightforward task, but can be time-consuming. Therefore, it is best to start early.