Position summary

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries seeks a Research Impact and Intelligence Librarian to lead and develop the Libraries' nascent Research Impact Service into a fully-fledged program. The service already provides consultations, departmental and unit impact reports, benchmarking, and training. The person we hire will take it further, shaping what research intelligence means at CMU and working with researchers, departments, and campus leaders to turn data about research into insight that is accurate, contextual, and fair.

The librarian will combine bibliometric expertise with fluency in data analysis and visualization, potentially including the use of AI agents and automated workflows to carry out that work. They will help university faculty, departments, and labs understand their research in several dimensions, including scholarly influence, collaboration, societal and policy impact, contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and position relative to peers. CMU is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and the librarian will help the campus put its principles into practice.

The position reports to the Associate Dean for Academic Engagement and is a member of the Academic Engagement team.

About CMU Libraries and Academic Engagement

Carnegie Mellon is a private research university based in Pittsburgh with strengths in computing, engineering, the sciences, business, policy, and the arts. Its research is highly interdisciplinary and often moves quickly from lab to industry and public policy. 

The Academic Engagement team connects the Libraries' expertise to teaching, learning, and research across campus. Team members work across subject areas and functions, share projects, and design services together. The Research Impact and Intelligence Librarian will collaborate closely with colleagues in liaison, data, open science, scholarly communications, and publishing roles. They will also partner with offices outside the Libraries, including the Office of the Vice President for Research, Institutional Research and Analysis, the associate deans for research in each college, department leadership, and research centers.

The Libraries provide a substantial toolkit for this work, which currently includes Digital Science's Dimensions, Altmetric, and Symplectic Elements; Elsevier's Scopus and SciVal; Clarivate’s Web of Science; Overton for policy citations; and OpenAlex as an open data source. The librarian will be expected to know where each tool is strong, where each is limited, and when to combine them.

What you will do:

• Develop and lead the research impact and intelligence program
• Be responsible for the development and delivery of the program, including consultations, research impact reports, self-service tools, and training, setting priorities with the Associate Dean and campus partners
• Manage the intake and turnaround of report requests, and develop scoping and documentation practices so that analyses are reproducible, well sourced, and transparent about their limits
• Expand the service so it moves beyond retrospective impact reporting to include prospective research intelligence and analysis
• Track developments in research evaluation, data sources, and related AI tools, and recommend how the service should change in response

Analyze and advise:

• Produce bibliometric and research analytics for researchers, departments, colleges, and university leadership, including collaboration and network analysis, topic and trend analysis, and benchmarking against peer institutions
• Interpret national and global university rankings for campus stakeholders, explaining their methods, data sources, and limitations
• Measure and describe societal and policy impact using sources such as Overton and Altmetric, alongside qualitative evidence
• Map CMU research to the UN Sustainable Development Goals in support of the university's sustainability commitments, and examine where SDG-related research and open science practices intersect
• Develop and manage outreach and engagement strategies for grant-funding platforms managed by the libraries, including Pivot and GrantForward
• Build clear, accurate data visualizations and dashboards, and write reports that make complex findings usable for non-specialists
• Use AI agents, scripting, and automated workflows to collect, clean, analyze, and visualize research data, and evaluate those methods for accuracy and biasTeach and guide

Teach and Guide:

• Consult with individual researchers on their research profiles and how to present impact in grant applications and reappointment, promotion, and tenure materials
• Design and deliver workshops for faculty, postdocs, graduate students, staff, and library colleagues on finding funding, bibliometrics, and other ways of assessing research impact
• Advise on responsible use of metrics in line with CMU's commitment as a DORA signatory and contribute to campus conversations about how research is evaluated

 Collaborate:

• Work as a member of the Academic Engagement team on shared projects and services
• Partner with colleagues in open science, data services, and scholarly communications on related work, such as open access, research outputs data, and the Elements research information system
• Participate in professional organizations and contribute to the wider field of research intelligence in libraries