That said, I suggest that people start removing things from their CVs as they advance in their careers. As you noted, Paul, information on courses taken seems superfluous after a point unless there’s something in particular that’s meant to signal (e.g., perhaps interdisciplinary training?).

I’ve always been a fan of the short CV, but I’m interested in the view of commenter #1 (“include everything”) because I don’t see how large amounts of detail will help a CV compete for attention with potentially hundreds of others. You probably have less than a minute to make an impression. Is this view widespread? If so, I’m never going to get a job with my three page CV.

The other thread on academic blogs leads me to muse that maybe CVs should become even shorter and just direct you to a website?

Sneaky, I know. But seriously, one doesn’t want to talk lots about paper rejections at a job interview. And when you’re starting out, and aiming for top journal placement, you’re bound to be rejected sometimes or lots.

I wasn’t wild about how it was executed, but it did move my prep time from working on my packet to figuring out how to get all the material input correctly.

Papers under review or still being revised can go in a Writing in Progress section—shows the variety of your interests without suggesting that things are complete but not sent to journals.

And, following on Eszter’s point about order, I think it even helps to put the most important things on a part of the page where they’re most likely to be seen. E.g. let’s say you won a prestigious prize. Put a section on Prizes or Awards at the top of a page, and put the prestigious one at the top of the list. Search committee members are skimming quickly—don’t give them a chance to miss a key bit of information by burying it in the middle of a section or at the bottom of a page.

In addition to what Bill Gardner said, see the follow-up post I just put up. Even at junior level, people get approached. But it is still important to have information that is easy to make sense of and can be shared readily with colleagues as one makes a case for a particular candidate.

Jacob, I think that’s a good point about listing the journal of an R&R paper (I’ll go and look whether I can tweak my post to reflect this). I certainly agree that there is considerable value to having an R&R at a top journal especially.

I would also encourage including that information in any promotion and tenure materials, but those aren’t disseminated nearly as widely.

This says nothing about the value of education, but it says something about the funding, i.e. the value as perceived by the voting public and its representatives.

The title of the paper alone compromises blind review if one of the referees happens to see the CV; and for everyone else there’s no ethical loss and a significant informational gain to including the journal name. An R&R from a top journal is valuable; it signals some predictable likelihood of publication in that journal and a high likelihood of publication one or two tiers down, and indicates much-better-than-average-grad-student level work.

Many readers skip cover letters entirely (really), making a dissertation abstract on the vita useful.