Beyond the Publication List: Professional Identity in Research Grant Applications

Research assessment is increasingly moving beyond publication metrics toward narrative documents, yet little is known about the professional profiles researchers construct in them. This paper examines how researchers use “narrative CVs” to present their professional contributions in a high-stakes grant-application setting. Using 1,211 narrative CVs submitted to the Luxembourg National Research Fund between 2021 and 2025, we analyze how applicants allocate attention across eight contribution domains, including research outputs, career achievements, people development, service to the scientific community, and service to society. We show that these narratives vary along two distinct dimensions: the balance of attention applicants allocate across academic roles, and the extent to which their profiles resemble the prevailing applicant profile. Conventional indicators explain only a limited share of this variation: bibliometrics, observable researcher characteristics, and linguistic style jointly account for 12.7% of the variation in balance and 3.4% of the variation in alignment. Narrative CVs therefore appear to elicit dimensions of professional self-presentation that are not readily recovered from publication and citation records. The study contributes to research on science evaluation by showing that narrative formats do more than supplement metrics with additional facts: they create a structured space in which researchers construct broader professional profiles. Methodologically, it provides a scalable approach to analyzing such narrative profiles.