03 · What You Need to Know
The Answer Depends on What You Mean by Research Impact
“Impact” does not have one universal meaning
The term research impact is used differently across institutions, funding systems, disciplines, and research-assessment frameworks. This creates confusion because researchers may use the same word while referring to quite different things.
Some discussions distinguish academic or scholarly impact from wider societal or economic impact. Under this broader usage, research can have academic impact by changing understanding, theory, methods, or subsequent research.
Other systems deliberately reserve the word impact for effects beyond academia. The United Kingdom's Research Excellence Framework, for example, has treated impact for assessment purposes as effects, changes, or benefits beyond academia, while research outputs and their academic contribution are assessed separately.
Scholarly contribution
The research changes what researchers know, how they understand a phenomenon, what methods they can use, or what subsequent questions they can investigate.
Wider impact
The research contributes to effects beyond scholarship, such as changes in policy, professional practice, health, society, culture, the environment, public services, or the economy.
Neither terminology is inherently correct for every context. What matters is defining the term rather than allowing “impact” to carry several meanings at once.
Research contribution is a more appropriate universal expectation
Every defensible research project should have a reason for existing. It should address a meaningful question, uncertainty, problem, methodological limitation, or gap in understanding and be capable of producing information worth knowing.
That is different from saying that every project should directly change the world outside research.
This distinction follows from the more fundamental question of what research is ultimately for. Research may contribute to explanation, description, prediction, testing, measurement, critique, understanding, application, or other forms of inquiry. Wider consequences sometimes follow, but the route between knowledge and consequence can be long and indirect.
Impact can occur through chains of research rather than individual studies
A practical change may depend on decades of research involving many investigators and multiple forms of contribution.
Foundational research Researchers establish concepts, mechanisms, observations, or theoretical possibilities.
Methodological development New measurements or methods make previously difficult questions answerable.
Accumulating evidence Multiple studies test, replicate, refine, challenge, and synthesize findings.
Translation and application Researchers and other stakeholders determine whether the accumulated evidence can inform interventions, technologies, policies, or practices.
Wider consequences Changes may eventually occur in society, professional practice, the economy, health, culture, or other domains.
Attributing the final outcome to one study may therefore be difficult and sometimes misleading. Earlier studies can be necessary without being sufficient for the eventual impact.
This helps explain how research can benefit society indirectly or after substantial time has passed.
Some research is deliberately closer to application
None of this means researchers should dismiss external impact. For applied research, practical consequences may be central to the purpose of the work.
A study evaluating a public-health intervention, testing a professional procedure, assessing an educational program, or examining a policy may reasonably be expected to consider who could use the evidence and what decisions it might inform.
For such research, refusing to consider application on the grounds that “knowledge is enough” could ignore part of the study's stated purpose.
The relevant expectation should therefore depend on the research. A project explicitly intended to contribute to policy and decision-making has a different relationship to impact from research investigating a foundational theoretical question.
Foundational research cannot always specify its eventual use
Curiosity-driven and foundational research present a different challenge. Researchers may investigate phenomena because they are poorly understood, theoretically important, or capable of revealing something fundamental without knowing whether a practical application will follow.
This uncertainty is not necessarily a defect. Requiring researchers to predict applications before the relevant knowledge exists can encourage speculative promises rather than better research.
The distinction between curiosity-driven and problem-driven research is useful here. Both can contribute to knowledge systems, but they begin with different motivations and may have very different pathways to wider benefit.
Research without an immediate practical application should therefore not automatically be regarded as deficient.
Impact is difficult to predict prospectively
Researchers can often describe plausible pathways through which findings might become useful. Predicting actual impact is harder.
A promising intervention may fail in implementation. A theoretical discovery may unexpectedly become useful years later. A finding intended for one purpose may become important in another domain. Political, economic, technological, organizational, and social circumstances can alter whether knowledge is used.
Researchers should therefore distinguish among intended impact, potential impact, pathways to impact, and demonstrated impact.
Potential impact
A plausible future effect or benefit that could arise if the research is subsequently used or developed.
Demonstrated impact
An effect, change, or benefit for which there is evidence linking research to what actually occurred.
Potential impact should not be written as though it has already happened.
Citations are not the same as societal impact
Citation counts can indicate that research has been referenced in subsequent scholarly literature. They do not, by themselves, establish that the work changed policy, improved practice, benefited society, or even that citing researchers agreed with the work.
Likewise, journal prestige and bibliometric indicators should not be treated as substitutes for the broader consequences of research. Responsible research assessment initiatives have repeatedly cautioned against reducing research quality or significance to simplistic quantitative indicators.
The distinction is particularly important because academic visibility, scholarly influence, and societal benefit can overlap without being interchangeable.
The demand for impact can change what researchers choose to study
Impact expectations do not merely evaluate research after it occurs. They can influence which projects are proposed in the first place.
If researchers believe that only projects promising visible short-term benefits will be funded or rewarded, they may avoid questions whose value is uncertain, foundational, long-term, difficult to quantify, or primarily scholarly.
That creates a potential selection problem. A research system can become very good at rewarding projects that describe an attractive impact pathway while overlooking work whose eventual significance cannot yet be predicted.
Watch Out
An impact statement is not evidence of impact. Researchers should distinguish what the project is designed to accomplish from what might plausibly happen later, and avoid converting speculative future benefits into promises.
This tension becomes especially important when pressure to demonstrate impact begins to distort the purpose of research. Impact can be a legitimate goal while still becoming counterproductive when applied as an inflexible requirement.
