Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
Research into a regional oral-history archive leading to a public museum exhibition and schools curriculum resource, evidenced by visitor numbers and curator testimony (illustrative example).
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A paper widely cited by other digital-humanities researchers, but reaching no public audience, is academic impact rather than cultural impact.
Editorial commentary
Cultural impact includes contributions to museums, galleries, performance, broadcast media, creative writing, conservation of cultural heritage, and shifts in public understanding of history, identity and the arts. It is particularly central to the humanities and creative-arts disciplines, where a research output may itself be a performance, exhibition, or creative work rather than a conventional paper. Because these outputs and their audiences don’t map onto citation counts, cultural impact assessment relies on different evidence: audience-engagement statistics (attendance, reach), expert testimony from practitioners or curators, critical reception, and structured case-study narratives connecting a specific piece of research to a specific downstream effect.
How it differs from academic and economic impact
Academic impact is impact within a field of scholarship — evidenced by citation, uptake in subsequent research, or influence on a discipline’s methods. Economic impact concerns commercial or productivity effects — new products, jobs, cost savings. Cultural impact sits alongside both as a distinct non-academic-impact category focused specifically on the arts, heritage, and public cultural life; a single research project can generate more than one type simultaneously (for example, archival research that is both cited by other historians — academic impact — and forms the basis of a public exhibition — cultural impact).
In the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), cultural impact is one of the recognised categories within the broader impact assessment, and REF’s published impact case study database provides a large, searchable body of real worked examples of how institutions have framed and evidenced this kind of impact.
Example (illustrative, not a specific real case): A humanities department’s research into a regional oral-history archive leads to a public exhibition co-produced with a local museum and a schools curriculum resource — evidenced through visitor numbers, curator testimony, and media coverage rather than citation counts.
Counter-example: A paper on museum-collection digitization methods that is widely cited by other digital-humanities researchers, but never reaches a public audience or shapes any exhibition or broadcast output, demonstrates academic impact, not cultural impact.
References
- Arts and Humanities Research Council impact toolkit
- REF 2021 impact case study database
Also known as
Cultural impact (research)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Cultural impact"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/cultural-impact" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/cultural-impact",
"name": "Cultural impact",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/cultural-impact",
"description": "Cultural impact is a category of non-academic research impact concerned with effects on museums, galleries, performance, broadcast media, creative practice, heritage conservation, and public understanding of history, identity, and the arts. It is distinguished from academic impact (effect on a field of scholarship, evidenced through citation and uptake by other researchers) and from economic impact (effect on commercial value, jobs, or productivity) by being evidenced through audience engagement, critical reception, and expert testimony rather than metrics or financial figures.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/engagement-impact-sdg#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/cultural-impact",
"sameAs": [
"Cultural impact (research)"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:22:56",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T12:42:13",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
