Academic CV for PhD and Research Positions: Publications, Grants and Teaching, Section by Section

An academic CV is the one CV where «keep it to two pages» is wrong. Hiring committees expect a complete record: every publication, every grant, every course taught, every talk. The skill is not in cutting but in ordering: the sections the committee cares about for this post come first, and every entry is formatted so it can be verified in seconds. This guide gives the full structure and the conventions that differ between countries.

Structure of an academic CV

1. Header: name, institution and department, email, ORCID, Google Scholar or ResearchGate link.
2. Research profile: 4–6 lines on your field, questions, methods and the direction of your next work.
3. Education: degrees with institution, year, thesis title and supervisor; for PhD applications, add grades and the dissertation topic.
4. Positions: academic and research appointments, most recent first.
5. Publications: grouped (peer-reviewed articles, books and chapters, conference papers, preprints, in review), numbered, full citations, your name in bold, corresponding or first-author marks.
6. Grants and awards: funder, title, amount, role (PI, Co-I), dates.
7. Teaching: courses with level, role (lecturer, TA, convenor), class size, supervision of students.
8. Conference presentations and invited talks.
9. Service: reviewing (journals, grants), committees, editorial roles, outreach.
10. Skills: methods, software, languages, lab techniques, datasets.
11. References: usually three, with full contact details, at the end.

Sample research profile

Computational biologist (PhD, 2023) working on single-cell transcriptomics of immune ageing. Author of 9 peer-reviewed papers (4 first-author, including Nature Immunology 2025), developer of an open-source cell-type annotation tool with 1,200 GitHub stars, and Co-I on a €240k Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant. I teach statistics for life sciences (120 students) and supervise two master's theses. My next work extends the ageing atlas to longitudinal cohorts.

How to list publications

• Use one citation style consistently (APA, Vancouver or your field's norm) and include DOIs.
• Bold your own name; mark joint first authorship and corresponding authorship.
• Separate peer-reviewed work from preprints and manuscripts in review; never pad with «in preparation» unless the post explicitly allows it.
• Metrics (citations, h-index, journal impact) are optional and field-dependent; where you add them, state the source and date.
• For PhD applicants with no publications, list the thesis, posters and any research assistantship outputs instead.

Grants, teaching and service with numbers

• Grants: funder, scheme, amount, role, period, and what it funded («Co-I, EU MSCA-DN, €240k of a €3.1M consortium, 2024–2027»).
• Teaching: course, level, your role, class size, contact hours, and any evaluation score with its scale.
• Supervision: number of students at each level and completions.
• Service: journals reviewed for (count per year), committee roles, conference organisation with attendee numbers.

Country differences

UK and Ireland: full academic CV with no length limit, references at the end, teaching and REF-relevant outputs prominent for lectureships. USA: curriculum vitae of any length; for tenure-track posts, add a research statement and teaching statement as separate documents. Germany and Austria: Lebenslauf plus Publikationsliste as separate files are common; include Habilitation status and Drittmittel (third-party funding) totals. France: CV with list of publications and a «projet de recherche»; CNU qualification matters. Gulf: universities ask for an academic CV plus accreditation-relevant data (Scopus-indexed papers, teaching loads); state visa status. Japan: 履歴書 plus 研究業績書 (research achievements list) in the prescribed format; China: list SCI-indexed papers and impact factors explicitly, and national grant numbers (NSFC).

What never to cut, and what to leave out

• Keep: every peer-reviewed publication, every grant, every course taught, every supervised student, every invited talk.
• Leave out: non-academic jobs unrelated to the post (one line at most), hobbies, photo (except where customary), a long skills list of office software.
• Order by relevance to the post: for a teaching-focused lectureship, teaching before publications; for a research fellowship, publications and grants first.

An academic CV is not read. It is checked. Format every entry so the checker can verify it in seconds.

Build the full structure from scratch

CV Analyz's from-scratch wizard sets up the complete academic structure (research profile, publications, grants, teaching, service, references) and formats entries consistently, so you spend your time on the content, not the layout.