No Publications? Fix Your Academic CV Publications Section

The first question I ask

When someone comes to me with "I don't know where to start with this section," I don't ask what they have written. I ask one thing:

Can you name two items that are dated, attributable to you by name, and checkable by a stranger with a browser and ten minutes?

Dated means it has a year attached. Attributable means your name is on it, or a named organization will confirm you produced it. Checkable means a committee member who is mildly suspicious can verify it exists without emailing you.

Two or more items that clear all three tests? The section survives, under a different name. Fewer than two? Cut the heading. Move the content somewhere it will be read properly. We will get to where.

That test is the whole decision. Everything below is about executing it well.

The rubric reality on sessional and teaching-stream postings

I want to be clear about what follows: this is my experience on hiring committees, not a published statistic. There is no public database of shortlisting rubrics, and anyone who tells you there is a national standard is guessing.

Here is what I have seen. On a sessional instructor or teaching-stream posting, the shortlisting grid is usually a scoring sheet with somewhere between six and a dozen rows. Teaching experience. Course fit against the specific sections being staffed. Credential documentation. Availability. Sometimes student evaluation evidence if the applicant has taught before. Sometimes a required-qualification checkbox that is pass or fail before anything gets scored at all.

Research, where it appears on that kind of grid, is frequently one low-weight row. A couple of points out of thirty, or a tiebreaker column, or nothing at all.

Now think about what happens to a file where the applicant has spent their energy on the row worth two points and left the rows worth twenty-two underdeveloped. I have read that file many times.

It usually comes from a genuinely excellent practitioner who has been told, by someone with a research-track CV, that publications are the currency of academia. On a research-track CV they are. On the posting in front of me, they are a rounding error.

The files that get cut on teaching-focused competitions are almost never cut for absent research. They get cut for no teaching evidence, no signal that the applicant has read the course description, and missing credential documentation.

Why absence is quieter than emptiness

Committee reading is fast. First pass through a stack, you are giving each file somewhere in the neighbourhood of a minute, and a big part of that minute is your eye moving down the left margin hitting headings. For the rest of that scan sequence, see what faculty hiring committees actually look at in your CV.

When the eye hits a bold heading, it stops and looks for content. That is what headings are for. If it stops on Publications and finds one line, the reader has now spent a beat of their attention on the single dimension where you are weakest, and they have registered it as a gap rather than as a non-issue.

If the heading is not there at all, nothing happens. The eye keeps moving to Teaching Experience. No beat, no gap, no note.

That is the practical argument for cutting a CV with no publications down to the sections that carry weight. Absence is quiet. Emptiness is loud.

A CPA I worked with is a good example, and I have changed the identifying details here and in the other cases below. Eighteen years in audit, senior manager at a mid-size firm, applying to teach introductory financial accounting. Her publications heading had two entries: a firm newsletter piece and a LinkedIn article on ASPE changes.

That section pulled the reader's attention straight to her weakest dimension. Meanwhile, forty hours of training she had delivered to CPA candidates and junior staff was buried further down the page. That training record was the closest thing on her CV to direct evidence she can stand in front of a room and teach accounting to beginners, and the layout guaranteed it got read second.

What to rename the academic CV publications section to

If you cleared the two-item test, you are not deleting. You are relabelling, and honest relabelling is standard genre practice, not a dodge. If you already have a mixed stack of peer-reviewed work, grey literature, and public writing, the hierarchy for that stack is covered in academic CV for industry professionals. This page is the prior decision: whether the heading belongs on the page at all.

Committees read hundreds of CVs. We know what a practitioner CV looks like. Nobody is fooled by Publications on a file without a research record, and nobody is offended by a heading that accurately describes what is underneath it.

Usable headings:

• Professional Contributions
• Technical and Professional Publications
• Invited Talks and Professional Presentations
• Professional Contributions and Presentations if you are mixing written and spoken work

Pick the one that honestly describes the contents. If three of your four items are talks, do not call the section Publications.

Categories that legitimately belong

Peer-reviewed or scholarly items, if you have any. One co-authored chapter counts. List it first and let it be small.

Practitioner and trade publications. A column in an industry magazine, a bylined piece in a professional association journal, a firm publication that is externally distributed and carries your name. The test is external distribution plus your byline.

Technical reports and standards work. Guidance documents, code committee membership with term dates, standards contributions. A structural engineer I worked with had three technical design guidance documents adopted across his firm, two conference presentations, and a code committee seat. Under a heading called Professional and Technical Contributions, with venues and dates, every one of those is verifiable. Under Publications, they look like an apology.

Invited talks and CPD sessions delivered. This is the most undervalued category on practitioner CVs and I do not fully understand why. Most Canadian professional bodies require documented continuing professional development, which means there is already a paper trail for professional learning, and for many practitioners a record of having delivered sessions to peers.

If you have taught CLE, run CPD for your association, or trained junior staff on a schedule, that is a repeated, dated, externally organized record of you teaching adults. Put it on the page with dates, audiences and hours.

Curriculum and training materials built for a named client or institution. Not a slide deck you made once. A training program you designed for an identified organization, with a date range and a scope. Name the client if you are permitted to.

The attribution standard for every entry

Each line needs three things: a year, a venue or organization, and something a reader could check.

"Presented at the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering annual conference, 2023" is checkable. "Various internal presentations" is not, and it makes me wonder what else on the page is inflated.

The entries that cost you the reader

Briefly, because this deserves its own treatment: internal decks, unbranded newsletters, undated items, and anything listed as "in preparation" when nothing has been submitted anywhere.

I have not seen a study quantifying how often padded sections get penalized, and I am not going to invent one. What I will tell you is the pattern I notice in my own reading. When I hit an entry I do not believe, I stop reading the CV as a description and start reading it as a claim to be audited. Nothing above that line gets the benefit of the doubt anymore. "In preparation" is the easiest line in the genre to disbelieve, because there is nothing to check and everyone knows it.

A blog post under Publications is not dishonest if it is labelled as a blog post with a date and a platform. It is dishonest when the heading implies a genre the item does not belong to. The fix is almost always the heading, not the entry.

Where the section sits on a teaching-stream CV

Section order is not formatting. It is a claim about what you want scored first.

On a teaching-stream or sessional file, the order that works is:

1. Teaching Experience
2. Professional Experience
3. Education and Credentials
4. Professional Contributions

If you have never formally taught a for-credit course, Professional Experience moves up and Teaching Experience becomes something like Teaching and Training Experience, populated with the CPD sessions, the training programs, the internal instruction, the guest lectures. For the rest of that translation, see how to write a CV for a university teaching job without a PhD.

What does not work is a research-track ordering on a teaching-track file: Education, Publications, Research Interests, and then Teaching somewhere on page two. That is the research camouflage trap in another costume.

That layout marches the reader through your thinnest material before they reach your strongest, and it tells the committee you have modelled your CV on a genre you are not applying in.

Genre literacy reads as coachability. It is a small signal and it is a real one.

What we are actually looking for in that part of the page

When a committee glances at scholarly output on a teaching-focused file, the question underneath is rarely "is this peer-reviewed."

The question is: can this person build and refresh a course without supervision, on a deadline?

That is it. Somebody has to produce twelve or thirteen weeks of current, accurate, teachable material, update it when the standards change, and deliver it without the chair chasing them. The research row is a weak proxy for that capacity. There are better proxies, and practitioners usually have them.

Ranked by how much credibility they carry in my reading:

1. Curriculum built for a named client, with scope and dates. This is the closest analogue to course design that exists outside a university.
2. CPD or CLE sessions delivered on a recurring schedule. Recurring is the key word. Once is a favour. Four years running is a capability.
3. Standards, code, or committee work. It proves you stay current in a documented way and can work inside a deadline-driven group.
4. Practitioner writing with a byline. Proves you can produce content to a length and a date.

A litigator I worked with had one co-authored practitioner chapter in a CLE volume and a regular CLE presenting record. The chapter, listed alone under Publications, looked like scarcity. The CLE record, listed with years and topics, answered the real question directly.

The context nobody mentions in the templates

One thing has shifted the market you are applying into, and it is worth understanding.

In January 2024, IRCC announced a two-year cap on new international study permit applications, expected to produce roughly 360,000 approved permits for 2024, described as about a 35% decrease from 2023. In September 2024, IRCC went further, setting a target of approximately 437,000 study permits for 2025 and extending the attestation letter requirement to master's and doctoral applicants.

I will keep the causal claim modest, because the link from enrolment policy to any individual hiring committee's criteria is observational, not something I can source for you.

But departments and colleges running leaner budgets are staffing sections, not building research programs. When the conversation in the room is "who can take three sections of intro accounting in January," the research row does not get heavier. It gets lighter.

Worth noting on the structural picture: the AAUP reports that roughly two-thirds of instructional positions in U.S. higher education are contingent. Canada has no equivalent reliable national figure, because Statistics Canada's UCASS survey historically excluded part-time and contract staff. CAUT has long pointed out that a large share of Canadian university teaching is delivered by contract academic staff. Anyone quoting you a precise Canadian percentage is making it up.

What is documented is that teaching-focused ranks are real and formal. The University of Toronto, for example, has an Assistant and Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, with promotion criteria built on teaching effectiveness and pedagogical or professional contributions rather than a conventional research publication record. That is written into institutional policy. The career path you are considering is not a consolation prize someone invented.

So, do you delete the academic CV publications section?

Run the test. Two or more items that are dated, attributable and checkable by a stranger.

Under two: cut the heading, redistribute the content into Teaching and Training Experience or Professional Experience, and stop worrying about it. The row it would have scored on is worth less than you have been told.

Two or more: rename it honestly, put a year and a venue on every line, and place it below your teaching and professional sections where it functions as reinforcement rather than as the headline.

Either way, the energy you were spending on that heading belongs on the rows that actually carry weight: what you have taught, who you taught it to, and why you are the obvious person for the specific sections in the posting.

Where to Go From Here

If you are staring at a CV and cannot tell which of your work clears the checkable standard, that is usually a twenty-minute conversation, not a rewrite. It is the conversation I have most often with people making this move from industry into sessional or teaching-stream roles.

Bring the draft you are stuck on. A free application audit looks at whether the publications heading is helping or hurting, and whether the rows that actually get scored — teaching, training, and course fit — are doing the work they should.

Get a Free Audit of the CV You're Stuck On

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