v2026.1CASRAI Dictionary 1,610 entries across 24 domains · CC-BY 4.01,610 entries · CC-BY 4.0

Dictionary termTrack EStablev2026.2

Cultural impact

The contribution that research makes to cultural understanding, heritage, the arts, creative industries, and the ways societies make meaning of their past, present and future.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

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Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
Research on a community's oral history shapes a major museum exhibition with documented visitor engagement.
Is an instance
Critical scholarship informs a widely watched documentary changing public understanding of a historical event.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
Claiming cultural impact from a single conference talk with no broader cultural uptake.
Not an instance
Confusing dissemination (public lectures) with cultural impact (cultural change).

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 outputs may themselves be performances, exhibitions or creative works. Cultural impact assessment uses audience-engagement statistics, expert testimony, critical reception, and case-study narratives. REF impact case studies in the humanities provide extensive worked examples.

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

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Cultural impact"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/cultural-impact" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@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": "The contribution that research makes to cultural understanding, heritage, the arts, creative industries, and the ways societies make meaning of their past, present and future.",
  "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"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:22:56",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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