Research CV, grants and methods.

Your technique inventory

On a research CV the methods section does work the publication list cannot. A principal investigator planning a project is asking a practical question: if I hire this person, what can they operate from day one and what needs training?

So list techniques and rate them honestly. Independent, competent, supervised. Or expert, working, familiar. The labels matter less than having them, because an unrated list is read conservatively — the reader assumes everything is at the weakest level you could plausibly mean.

Group them sensibly: molecular, analytical, field, computational, statistical. And include the instrument makes where relevant — HPLC on an Agilent is not identical to HPLC on a Shimadzu, and a laboratory running one will notice.

PI, Co-I, and team member

Nothing on a research CV is checked more carefully than funding role, and nothing is overstated more often. Reviewers frequently know the grant, sometimes know the PI, and can verify in one email.

• Principal Investigator. The award is yours; you hold the money and the responsibility.
• Co-Investigator. Named on the application, usually with a defined workstream. Say which workstream.
• Research team member. Employed on the grant but not named on it. Entirely respectable, and it must not be written to look like the second category.

For early-career researchers, a small PI award is worth more than a share of a large one, because it proves you can be trusted with money independently. Mark it clearly, even if the amount is modest — especially then.

Outputs that are not papers

Publication counts favour some fields and some career stages badly. If yours is one of them, the answer is not to inflate the list — it is to give your other outputs a proper section.

• Datasets. Published, with a licence and a download or citation count.
• Software and code. Repository, users, releases, stars.
• Infrastructure. Networks, facilities, collections, databases you built and others use.
• Methods and protocols. Validated methods, published protocols, standard operating procedures adopted elsewhere.
• Technical reports. Internal or confidential work, counted rather than listed.
• Training materials. Manuals, courses and workshops that were adopted.

The strongest phrase in any of these is "now used by" — other groups, other institutions, other countries. Reuse by strangers is impact that no citation metric captures.