Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship applicant completing the four R4RI domains instead of a traditional CV and publication list.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A US tenure-track applicant's research statement is a different document — a forward-looking scholarly agenda for a hiring committee, not an R4RI narrative.
Editorial commentary
R4RI (Résumé for Research and Innovation) is UK Research and Innovation’s specific, named implementation of the narrative CV concept. It was developed by the Royal Society in collaboration with funders and learned societies as a practical alternative to publication-list-driven CVs, and structures a researcher’s self-description around four defined domains rather than open-ended free text:
- Contributions to the generation of new ideas, tools, methodologies, or knowledge;
- Contributions to the development of others and the maintenance of effective working relationships;
- Contributions to the wider research and innovation community; and
- Contributions to broader research/innovation users, audiences, and societal benefit.
Each domain is completed as a short free-text narrative supplied by the applicant. The overall word count for the R4RI is set by the specific funding opportunity rather than being fixed UKRI-wide — applicants should always check the individual call’s guidance for the exact limit, rather than assuming a standard figure applies. The Royal Society first published the Resume for Researchers in 2019 as a voluntary alternative to the publication-list CV, and it circulated in that form for several years before any funder mandate attached to it. UKRI’s adoption was phased rather than a single switch-on: it piloted R4RI-style narrative CVs from 2020, then rolled the format out in stages between 2022 and 2024 as funding opportunities migrated to the new UKRI Funding Service, replacing the previous "Track Record" CV section. It has also been adopted and adapted by other UK funders, including NIHR. UKRI additionally issues reviewer guidance directing assessors to read the four narratives qualitatively rather than counting publications, and frames the change as part of its response to the Metric Tide review and its commitments under CoARA (the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment).
A note on the mandate date. Published sources disagree on when R4RI became mandatory: some date it to 2022, when the first UKRI opportunities began requiring it, and others to January 2024, by which point it applied across most of the portfolio. Because the rollout was staged opportunity-by-opportunity, both dates describe part of the same transition and neither is straightforwardly wrong. CASRAI has not been able to verify a single authoritative mandate date against UKRI’s own published guidance, so this entry deliberately does not assert one — applicants should take the requirement and the word limit from the specific funding opportunity’s guidance rather than from any blanket date.
The format deliberately excludes metrics-only listings — there is no place in the four domains for a bare journal-impact-factor or citation-count table — which is what situates R4RI within the DORA-aligned (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) shift toward responsible research assessment, rather than making it a purely cosmetic change of CV layout.
How this differs from the related terms on this site
R4RI is the specific, named UKRI/Royal Society template — not the general concept. Narrative CV is the broader movement R4RI belongs to, alongside other funders’ own formats (Dutch Recognition & Rewards, NIH Biosketch narrative sections, the ERC’s own format, SNSF). Two-page narrative describes the short fixed-length format convention associated with R4RI and comparable templates, rather than naming the UKRI template itself.
Example: A UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship applicant completes the four R4RI domains in place of a traditional CV and publication list, within the word limit set by that specific funding opportunity.
Counter-example: A US tenure-track job applicant writing a research statement is producing a different document entirely — a forward-looking scholarly agenda for a hiring committee, not an R4RI-style four-domain narrative for a funder.
References
- UKRI, Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI) guidance
- Royal Society Resume for Researchers
Also known as
R4RI · Royal Society narrative CV · Resume for Researchers
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="R4RI (Resume for Researchers / Royal Society narrative CV)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/r4ri-resume-for-researchers" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/r4ri-resume-for-researchers",
"name": "R4RI (Resume for Researchers / Royal Society narrative CV)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/r4ri-resume-for-researchers",
"description": "R4RI (Résumé for Research and Innovation, also called Resume for Researchers or the Royal Society narrative CV) is UKRI's specific, named narrative-CV template. It structures a researcher's self-description around four defined domains rather than open-ended prose, and has been mandatory across UKRI funding applications since January 2024.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/responsible-assessment#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/r4ri-resume-for-researchers",
"sameAs": [
"R4RI",
"Royal Society narrative CV",
"Resume for Researchers"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:22:55",
"dateModified": "2026-08-23T05:25:22",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
