If you are an international student applying for a PhD programme, a postdoctoral fellowship, a conference travel grant, or a research assistantship abroad, you will be asked for an academic CV — not a standard one-page resume. An academic CV (also called a scholarly curriculum vitae) is a long, detailed record of your entire research life: every degree, every paper, every talk, every award. Unlike an industry resume, it grows with your career and can run anywhere from two pages as an early PhD student to fifteen or twenty pages for a senior academic.
This guide gives you a full research CV template for PhD students, walks through every section admissions committees and hiring panels expect to see, and explains the formatting conventions used by universities in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Europe. If English is your second language and you are worried about the phrasing of your CV or a reference letter, our English editing and certificate of language editing service can polish your document and supply a formal certificate that some journals and fellowships now require.
Academic CV vs. Industry Resume: The Core Difference
A resume is a marketing document — one or two pages, tailored to a single job, heavy on impact verbs and outcomes. An academic CV is an archival document — comprehensive, conservative in style, and designed to demonstrate sustained scholarly output. Selection committees are not scanning for buzzwords; they are checking that you have the training, publications, and teaching experience to succeed in a particular research culture.
Because of this, an academic CV is almost always in reverse-chronological order within each section, uses formal third-person phrasing or simple noun phrases, and never uses colourful graphics, photographs, icons, or two-column Canva-style templates. Stick to a single column of clean text in Times New Roman, Garamond, or a similar serif at 11–12pt, with generous white space and consistent dates.
Section 1: Contact Information and Personal Details
Begin at the top of page one with your full name in a slightly larger font, followed by your affiliation, institutional email, phone number with country code, city and country, and — crucially — your ORCID iD, Google Scholar profile URL, and personal academic website if you have one. If you are applying from India to a programme in North America or Europe, include the country code on your phone number (for example, +91) and write the country name in full.
Do not include a photograph, date of birth, marital status, religion, or nationality for applications to the US, UK, Canada, or Australia — these institutions consider such information discriminatory to collect. For some European countries (notably Germany, France, and parts of Eastern Europe), a photograph and date of birth are still conventional. When in doubt, check two or three recently successful CVs from researchers who joined your target institution in the last two years.
Section 2: Research Interests or Research Summary
Below your contact block, write a short paragraph (three to five lines) or a bulleted list of four to six phrases describing your research areas. Keep this focused: "computational linguistics, low-resource machine translation, morphologically rich Indian languages" is stronger than "natural language processing and its applications." This section acts as a signpost so a reader can decide in ten seconds whether your profile matches a vacant position, a PI's lab, or a funding call.
Section 3: Education
List every university degree in reverse-chronological order. For each entry include the degree name in full, the university and department, the city and country, the dates of enrolment, and — when it strengthens your candidacy — your CGPA or percentage with the maximum scale (for example, "CGPA 9.12 / 10"). If you are a current PhD student, list your PhD first with "expected 2028" or the thesis submission date.
Under your PhD and master's entries, add two to four lines on your thesis title, supervisor(s), and the core methods or datasets you used. This tiny expansion tells a reviewer what you actually know how to do, which is often more persuasive than the grade itself.
Section 4: Publications
Publications are the single most scrutinised part of a scholarly curriculum vitae. Split them into clearly labelled subsections so readers can see at a glance how many of each type you have:
- Peer-reviewed journal articles (most important — list SCOPUS or Web of Science indexed journals with the impact factor in brackets if it helps)
- Peer-reviewed conference proceedings (in computer science and engineering, these often outrank journals)
- Book chapters
- Edited volumes or special issues
- Preprints and manuscripts under review (clearly marked as such — never blur the line)
- Other writing (policy briefs, magazine articles, op-eds, blog posts, translations)
Use a single citation style throughout — APA 7, Chicago, or a numbered style — and underline or bold your own name in each reference so it stands out among co-authors. Include the DOI for every published item. If a paper is first-author or equal-contribution, note this with a footnote or asterisk; committees reviewing early-career researchers care deeply about author order.
Section 5: Conference Presentations and Invited Talks
Keep talks separate from publications. List the presentation title, the event name and location, the date, and whether it was an oral talk, poster, invited lecture, or keynote. Panels weigh an invited talk at a top-tier venue far higher than a poster at a local workshop, so labelling matters. International presentations also demonstrate that you can work in English-speaking research environments, which is especially useful for applications to North American and European universities.
Section 6: Grants, Scholarships, and Fellowships
List every competitive funding award you have received, including the name of the scheme, the awarding body, the amount in local currency, and the duration. For international applicants, write out unfamiliar Indian agency names in full — for example, "University Grants Commission (UGC) Junior Research Fellowship" — and include the selection ratio or number of awardees if it is impressive. A committee in Toronto or Munich will not automatically know how selective a CSIR-NET or ICMR fellowship is.
Section 7: Awards and Honours
A brief list of academic awards: best-paper prizes, gold medals, deans' lists, merit scholarships, travel grants, and society memberships that are selective. Do not pad this section with attendance certificates or participation awards — they weaken a strong CV.
Section 8: Teaching Experience
If you are applying for any faculty-track or teaching-heavy programme, this section becomes critical. For each role, list the course title and level (undergraduate / postgraduate), the institution, your role (instructor of record, teaching assistant, tutor, guest lecturer), the semester and year, and the class size. When possible, note whether you designed the syllabus, set examination papers, or supervised lab sessions — these reflect greater responsibility than simple grading work.
Section 9: Research Experience Outside the Thesis
Include summer internships, lab rotations, visiting-researcher stints, and funded research projects where you were not the principal investigator. Describe your actual contribution in one or two lines: the dataset you built, the instrument you operated, the model you implemented, or the fieldwork you conducted. Vague entries like "contributed to research on climate change" tell a reviewer nothing.
Section 10: Skills, Languages, and Technical Training
Keep this compact and honest. Group by category: programming languages and their proficiency, statistical software (SPSS, R, Stata, SAS), laboratory or domain-specific techniques, and human languages with a CEFR level (A1 to C2) or IELTS / TOEFL scores where relevant. International applications often require proof of English proficiency; list your most recent test score with the test date here.
Section 11: Professional Service, Peer Review, and Memberships
Mention any reviewing you have done for journals or conferences, editorial board roles, society committee positions, student body leadership related to academia, and organising roles for workshops or conferences. Peer review is often under-reported by early-career researchers and is a concrete signal of community standing.
Section 12: References
For academic CVs, include three to five referees with their full name, title, institution, email, and a one-line note on their relationship to you ("PhD supervisor", "external examiner", "internship host"). Unlike industry resumes, "References available on request" is usually not acceptable — an academic committee expects the names up front so they can check informally before shortlisting.
Formatting Checklist Before You Send It
- One consistent font throughout; 11 or 12pt body text; 1-inch margins
- Page numbers and your surname in a footer on every page after the first
- All dates in one format (for example, "Aug 2024 – Jul 2026", not a mix of "August 2024" and "08/24")
- File saved as a PDF with a clear name: Surname_Givenname_CV_2026.pdf
- Spell-checked in British or American English consistently — not both
- Proof-read by a native speaker or professional editor if English is your second language
That last point matters more than most applicants realise. A CV with even small grammatical slips can quietly move you down a shortlist of equally qualified candidates. If you want a final pass from a senior academic editor — plus a formal certificate of language editing for scholarship applications or journal submissions — our English editing and certificate service handles both in a single turnaround.
Final Thought
A scholarly curriculum vitae is not a one-off document you write the night before a deadline. Treat it as a living file you update every time you publish, present, or win an award — ideally within a week of the event. Keep a master version with everything in it, and then create lightly trimmed copies for each specific application. Two years from now, when you are applying for a postdoc or a lectureship, you will thank yourself for the discipline.