Research development is increasingly recognized as a distinct field of employment. Practitioners currently self-identify as research development professionals based on their responsibilities or move into roles that have already been defined as being part of this field. The only professional organization in the United States for persons whose responsibilities have been defined as being in the field, the National Organization of Research Development Professionals (NORDP), just celebrated its tenth anniversary. As research development is a reasonably new realm of professional activity, the full extent of practitioner purposes and practices has yet to be delineated. To address the need for empirically-based understandings, an investigation of what research developers do was undertaken using the only known corpus that directly describes research development, the job descriptions in research development position announcements. Content analysis of this material was completed as the initial step in a multistage investigation that will address type, scope, and scale questions to facilitate a more formalized understanding of research development. The intention is to produce evidence-based understandings to "help us better understand what kinds of individuals, with what kinds of training, skills, and abilities, are best suited for various roles within research development, as well as what their professional trajectories are" (Stone, 2015, para. 5). This will facilitate differentiation from other areas of professional practice, like research administration, and "might improve our capacity to recruit, retain, and provide succession planning and longer-term career paths…in research development" (Stone, 2015, para. 5).