R pathway: what to include in your application

Application details

When completing the application form for the R pathway, you will need to complete the following sections of the form:

  • Personal details, including your name, contact details and current position details.
  • Which post you are applying for, choosing from Assistant Research Professor (Grade 9), Senior Research Associate (Grade 8), Research Associate (Grade 7) or Senior Research Assistant (Grade 6).
  • You will be asked if your application is multidisciplinary.  If it is, your personal statement should explain the multidisciplinary nature of your work and indicate which institutions your work mostly concerns.
  • You will be asked if you hold a clinical/NHS contract, or if you carry out clinical veterinary work. If you answer yes to either of these questions, please ensure you refer to these details in your personal statement.
  • You will be asked if you believe that contextual factors should be taken into consideration when evaluating your application. More details on this can be found here.


Note: If you hold a Research contract in more than one institution, you may only apply for promotion in the institutions where there is funding available to support promotion. If there is funding available in both institutions, you will only need to submit one application form covering both posts. If there is funding available to support the promotion in one institution only, you will only be able to apply for promotion in that institution.

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

You must submit a copy of your CV with your application form.  This should be a concise CV of no more than two sides of A4 (500 words), including any annotations. If preferred, you can choose to provide a narrative CV but please ensure it still contains the information below to ensure consistency in the information received by Promotion Panels.

Your CV must be attached as a separate document (in PDF format) to the application form.

Your CV should include the following:

  • Professional history, including all current and previous professional appointments held. Please include your role title, place of work, start dates and end dates (where applicable).
  • Education and Qualifications, including details of degrees, diplomas and/or other qualifications, and where and when obtained.
  • Appointments and Affiliations, including memberships of professional bodies, learned societies, advisory bodies, peer review activities (grants, journals, books etc), editorships etc, with start, and where relevant, end dates.
  • Prizes, Awards and Honours, including elections to prestigious professional/scientific bodies, providing the full name of the awarding/electing body and the year of the award/election.

Research and Researcher Development

In this section, you will be asked to provide information in the following sub-sections:

  • Grants: details of external grants and contracts awarded (including values and dates) since your appointment or last promotion (whichever was more recent), together with the names of co-investigators where applicable. Please note, student awards cannot be classed as grant capture.
  • Publications: please refer to the section below for more details on this.
  • Research Talks: include a list of significant talks/seminars or other research presentations (with month and year). Please specify where you were an invited speaker and/or whether you a delivered a keynote or plenary speech. Generally, keynote speeches are considered the primary speech, which sets the central theme of a conference, whereas plenary speeches cover a broad range of topics. However, in some disciplines, the terms keynote and plenary may be used interchangeably.
  • Research Associations and Collaborations: provide details of other researchers, including visiting academics, with whom you are or have been directly associated in the recent past. These should be associations which you have been directly or primarily responsible for initiating (maximum of 1,000 words).
  • Other Scholarly Contributions: include any additional information about other contributions or work that you wish to be taken into account that has not already been set out in your application, i.e. other kinds of research or research-led outputs that are relevant to your discipline that have not been captured in your publications list, or another section of your application.  The outputs must be publicly available for consideration, and you must explain how the outputs are relevant to your research. Indicate if any of these are open access (free to read and reuse at no cost) by marking as ‘(open)’. You can discuss this with your Head of Institution, and/or a mentor.
  • Evidence of researcher development: details of how you have contributed to the development of other researchers or research groups. For example, through mentoring and guidance, leadership (formal or informal), training or teaching. When providing evidence of your contribution to researcher development, you must provide details of your own actions and input, and not the achievements of any researchers you may have supported.

Publications

You should include details of your publications, as follows:

  • An up-to-date list of publications, set out in accordance with the conventions of the relevant academic discipline.
  • The publications list must be structured into sections, including a section for peer-reviewed publications and a section for preprints and author accepted manuscripts which have a persistent Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
  • Within the sections referred to above, the publications list must be in a clear chronological order, stating for each publication (including any books) the year of publication, and page numbers (where available*). Where relevant, you must clearly mark publications since your last promotion/appointment with an asterisk.
  • The publications list must include only outputs which are publicly available for consideration**. Publications which have been “accepted and are in press” but are not yet publicly available must not be included in the publications list. However, if you would like to refer to an in-press publication in your personal statement (in addition to the four highlighted outputs (see here)), you can do so.
  • Indicate which publications are open access (free to read and reuse at no cost) by marking as ‘(open)’. 
  • Work in progress but not yet completed must not be included.
  • Citation data may be included in disciplines where this is appropriate; consideration of an application will not be prejudiced if citation data are not included. For the avoidance of doubt, applications will not be assessed on the basis of citation data/metrics alone, and these will be used in conjunction with qualitative indicators of research quality and impact, in line with the University’s guidance on the Responsible Use of Metrics in Research Assessment;.
  • Copies of publications must not be included.

The points noted on this page are intended as guidance only.  You are encouraged to follow disciplinary norms when preparing your publications list, which may differ from the above.

Outputs which can be included 

All research and research-led publications that are publicly available** for consideration (i.e. copies are obtainable at the time of application, or at some previous time, by members of the public through normal trade channels) can be included in your publications list. 

Non-standard contributions

For disciplines where the communication of research results is not, or is only partly, in the form of conventional scholarly publication, other forms of contribution should be listed in the “Other Scholarly Contributions” section of the application form (see above). 

Co-authored and multi-authored publications

You should provide details of your role and contribution in co-authored and multi-authored publications, as explained in the section on the personal statement.

Service to the University and Academic Community

You should provide a list of contributions other than in research undertaken in your Institution/School/University and any service to the academic community outside the University that you wish to have considered.  This might include service on the central University bodies, working parties/groups, reviews, engagement in widening participation activity, the design and delivery of outreach programmes, contribution to the subject undertaken outside the University, editorial work, contribution to academic societies and meetings, administrative duties carried out with regards to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), details of research management, of research groups, and the creation and management of multi-institutional national/international research facilities.  It may also include public engagement work and College teaching.

If you hold an Honorary NHS contract you should include details of your participation in regional and national committees (e.g. Royal Colleges, General Medical Council) and bodies concerned with undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, as well as details of your clinical duties. 

If you are engaged in clinical veterinary work, you should include details of your participation in regional and national committees and bodies concerned with postgraduate veterinary education, as well as details of your other clinical duties.

This section must be a maximum of 1,000 words.

 

*It is recognised that page numbers may not be available for online publications.

** It is recognised that in certain circumstances, a publication/output may not be publicly available, for example due to data confidentiality or ethical reasons. If this is the case, please explain briefly why the material is not publicly available and, if relevant, note any protocols by which others in your community might be able to access it.