Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A tenure dossier that documents mentorship, software maintained over a decade, and a career-long shift in research direction, alongside but not instead of a publication list.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A CV template with only a chronological publications section, with no space to describe non-paper contributions or career context, does not support a lifetime-contribution lens even if the underlying career was long and varied.
Editorial commentary
A lifetime-contribution lens evaluates a researcher’s career as a whole — including non-traditional outputs, career breaks, mentorship, and contributions that don’t fit a publication-count model — rather than assessing only a fixed recent window of journal articles. It is one of the structural features responsible-assessment reform pushes institutions toward, alongside the narrative-CV format that typically operationalises it.
How it’s implemented: narrative CVs
The clearest implementation of a lifetime-contribution lens is the narrative CV: rather than a bibliography and citation count, a candidate describes their contribution in prose, selecting and contextualising the evidence themselves. Canada’s Tri-Agency funders have been developing a shared narrative-CV approach building on the existing Canadian Common CV infrastructure. The UK’s Royal Society CV format and UKRI’s Resume for Research and Innovation are earlier examples of the same move.
NOR-CAM
Norway’s Career Assessment Matrix (NOR-CAM), developed by Universities Norway (UHR) and published 2020-2021, is a structured example of a lifetime-contribution lens: it assesses six areas — research outputs, research process, pedagogical competence, impact and innovation, leadership, and other experience — explicitly widening what counts as evidence of contribution beyond output counts, and predates CoARA’s December 2022 launch.
Trade-offs
A lifetime-contribution lens is more resource-intensive to assess than a metric snapshot: it requires reviewer time and judgement rather than a sortable number, and is harder to benchmark consistently across a large applicant pool. CoARA and DORA both treat this as a worthwhile trade-off against metric gaming and short-termism, not a cost-free change.
References
- Universities Norway, NOR-CAM matrix, 2020-2021. Tri-Agency (Canada) narrative CV development, sshrc-crsh.canada.ca. CoARA Agreement, coara.org.
Also known as
Career-spanning assessment · Lifetime achievement assessment
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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