Frequently Asked Questions

The personal statement is intended to provide space for a description of your unique career path, and to “describe why you are well suited for your proposed role relevant to the application” (TCV instructions). More precisely, it addresses “how and in what way your academic, professional or personal background enables you to meet the objectives of the program and carry out the current research proposal” (CV-FRQ instructions).

A good barometer for assessing what’s appropriate to reveal about yourself is whether you would feel comfortable making your narrative CV public, just as most researchers make their traditional CVs public. If you’d be comfortable sharing it publicly, you’re likely within the scope of what the TCV considers “personal” in a professional sense.

The “personal statement” is your opportunity to highlight the expertise and experiences that are essential to your project, particularly those that may not be visible in a traditional CV. You’re not obliged to share details of your private life to do so, and probably shouldn’t unless you feel it adds meaningful context. 

Describing your general research interests and activities is more than sufficient for the personal statement – that statement can be half a page if you’d like, as long as you connect it to why it matters for your project.

There are many ways to approach this, and decisions about which one to use may in many cases come down to fitting that information into the limited space you have. But remember that the narrative CV has to be self-contained: full citation information has to be contained within your narrative CV. You can’t refer to the bibliography you submit with your research proposal, and your traditional CV is not included in your application.

Your personal statement is an introduction, and as long as you provide full information on a contribution later (article citation, exhibition details, policy document information, etc.), in the “contributions and experiences” section, you can mention it in your personal statement without providing it there. Another option is to finish your narrative CV with a numbered table of everything cited, and add an endnote number every time you mention a contribution listed there. Such a table could also be in a slightly reduced font-size, “as long as it is legible when the page is viewed at 100%” (Tri-agency formatting instructions).

In-text citations can be used, but may be unwieldy as full citations within your narrative. Footnotes are a good option as well, in the “contributions and experiences” section, but remember that they have to meet all the formatting requirements for the rest of the CV (no reduced font-size).

Whatever format you choose, it is important to use one format consistently throughout your narrative CV, and adhere to the citation requirements of the agency to which you are applying. Note the citation requirements for the TCV and the CV-FRQ are not the same.

The current Tri-agency CV instructions list lived or living experience in the first section of the TCV. While the Fonds de recherche du Québec CV (CV-FRQ) instructions do not have a corresponding phrase, they indicate that “skills and expertise acquired through personal experience or achievements” and “practical experience” have their place in the first section of the CV-FRQ as well. These can also be a part of the other narrative CV sections; the amount of space given to this will vary.

Where lived experience has played a significant role in determining the focus or trajectory of your research, it would be appropriate to include this in the first section. Pertinence to your proposed research is an essential consideration: the overall purpose of the first section is to show why your expertise and experience make you well suited for your role in the research proposal to which you are attaching your narrative CV.

Where lived experience has played a significant role in a particular “contribution or experience” that is pertinent to your research proposal – in a community-focused collaboration, for example – it would likewise be appropriate to discuss it with respect to that in the Most significant contributions and experiences section.

Lived experience can deeply impact one’s mentorship and supervision as well. In this case, it would be appropriate to discuss – or refer back to – your lived experience in the Supervisory and mentorship activities section as well.

The order in which you present should likely vary by section.

For the first section, a chronological order of your experiences and career path may feel like a natural way to present, and shouldn’t necessarily be avoided. It is important to be selective though: a chronological order does not mean you should discuss every experience you’ve had (you should not!). If you are an early-career researcher and you had particularly striking and career-shaping experiences during your undergraduate and PhD education, for example, you can discuss those without necessarily discussing your experiences during your master’s degree. 

But there are many ways of organizing your first section other than chronologically. One way is to begin by noting the areas of expertise that you have, and that are pertinent to your research proposal, and then briefly discuss how you came to acquire them. In this case, it might be a good idea to order those areas of expertise according to how important each of them is for your proposed research rather than the chronological order in which you acquired them.

The same approach could also be used to organize your personal statement around areas of impact that your contributions have had, and leadership positions you have held, for example. And these are not mutually exclusive: expertise, impact, and leadership should all be included in your personal statement.

For the contributions and experiences section, pertinence of each contribution or experience to your proposed research, and its impact and significance, should guide the order of your presentation.  

Ultimately, regardless of what order(s) you use to present your narrative CV, don’t try to relate everything – choose what’s important for the proposed research.

In order to answer this question, it is important to make a distinction between: a) the citation count for an individual publication; b) career-total citation counts and the h-index; and c) the Journal Impact Factor (and other journal-based metrics):

1. The citation count for an individual publication is single-article/book-based: is the number of times an individual article or book is included in the reference list of other articles or books. 
2. Career-total citation counts and the h-index are multiple-article/book-based, and are blunt and vague quantitative metrics by design. 
3. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is journal-based and professes to rank journals according to their assumed level of impact. The JIF has a number of well documented deficiencies, and is not a good signifier of the value or quality of an individual article published in it, nor even a good predictor of the citation performance of any individual article.  

The Tri-agency and the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) are signatories to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which strongly discourages using the JIF and other journal-based metrics in the assessment of individual researchers’ contributions tout court. While neither the Tri-agency nor the FRQ currently prohibits noting the JIF or other journal-based metrics in their narrative CVs, it seems prudent to be reflective about using them. Peer-reviewers and selection committee members for Tri-agency applications are asked to disregard them.

DORA also does not consider a researcher’s career-total citation count to be a reliable metric, and is even more skeptical about the value of using the h-index in research assessment. 

On the other hand, DORA encourages the responsible use of individual article or book citation counts. While they should not be used instead of qualitative discussion of an article’s content, impact and significance in your narrative CV, they can be used in support of that discussion as a partial indicator. Used responsibly – which always includes noting the applicant’s role in the contribution – the citation count for an individual publication can be quite effective as a supplement to a broader and more contextual narrative about that publication. 

It is essential to carefully read both the TCV or CV-FRQ requirements and the instructions for the particular grant to which you are applying every time.

Discussing career delays in your narrative CV is in no way obligatory. At the time of writing (April 2025), three modules, related to but separate from the TCV, are required by the Tri-agency, in addition to the TCV:

1. Career delays
2. Education history
3. Academic affiliations.

These three modules are then attached to your narrative TCV for reviewers. The Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) has not yet said how such information will be collected for the narrative CV-FRQ.

If you think that your personal narrative should be seen qualitatively in light of eligible delays and interruptions you have experienced, and with nuance, the personal statement section is the place for that. With the exception of COVID-related delays, no one should feel in any way obliged to give details about reasons for eligible delays (such as parental, medical, bereavement and family care leaves, for example).  

The personal statement is also the perfect place to discuss the impacts of any delays that are not typically “counted”, but that count.

Tables and charts can be used in both the narrative TCV and the narrative CV-FRQ.

In the TCV, these have different formatting requirements than the rest of the TCV. “You may use other fonts and font sizes for text in tables, charts, figures, graphs and legends only, as long as it is legible when the page is viewed at 100%” (CIHR formatting instructions).

In the CV-FRQ, the formatting requirements are not yet specified.

Graphic elements can significantly increase the size of your document file. Ensure that your TCV and CV-FRQ remain within the permitted file size. File size limits differ between agencies.

Yes, you can include brief lists for such purposes, and interrupting the narrative to draw attention to such important recognition can be a very effective strategy. 

In general, it is important to find ways to punctuate and accentuate key aspects and impacts of contributions, and occasionally “jumping out of the story” with significant facts, in a list, is one of them. But do not use many brief lists, and do not use long lists at all.

This is a huge question, and one we’re giving separate focus to at Concordia. We don’t have an answer for this question yet, but we have identified one general net positive and one general net negative of using generative AI for narrative CVs:

• Net negative: the writing generally isn’t compelling. It’s flat in intangible but unmistakable ways, no matter how much you tell the AI to “make it more compelling”.
• Net positive: it helps meet a major equity challenge presented by a narrative CV that must be written in either French or English – applicants in Canada who have not yet mastered either language can generate a narrative TCV or CV-FRQ that is passable.

The Tri-agency no longer requires applicants to disclose the use of AI in grant preparation.  However, please remember that if you use generative AI to prepare any element of a Tri-agency grant application, including your TCV,, you are responsible for ensuring that all information included “is true, accurate and complete and that all sources are appropriately acknowledged and referenced” (See the Tri-agency’s Guidance document on the use of AI in research grant proposals).

For the CV-FRQ: the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ), for its part, notes that for all elements of applications to the FRQ, “applicants using generative AI tools in the preparation of a funding application should...do so responsibly, in particular by referring to guides in the field. Particular attention should be paid to the proper recognition of contributions and the risk of plagiarism” (translated from the French).

Information that is private (e.g. names of HQP) should not be uploaded into any online tool.

Note: Both the Tri-agency and FRQ strictly prohibit the use of publicly available online tools (such as ChatGPT and DeepL) in the evaluation of all elements of grant applications.

Yes. Maintaining a traditional CV is still imperative, both during the transition period to the TCV at the Tri-agency, and to the CV-FRQ at the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ), and afterward.

Maintaining an ORCID profile is perhaps the most convenient way to keep your traditional CV up to date. This will have the additional benefit of making your traditional CV available to any reviewers who might be searching for it (we know from surveys of European reviewers that evaluating narrative CVs presents challenges that many reviewers resolve by turning to online resources like ORCID).