To industry practitioners and students, impactful research and research impact may be just two ways to describe the same issue. However, in the academic world, these two terms have very different meanings. Impactful research is research that actually makes an impact and hopefully positive contributions to society, including the business sectors and citizens. 

It is not just about adding another paper to a journal or developing a clever theory. It is about creating knowledge that can help people, improve decisions, solve problems, or push society forward. This kind of research might influence public policy, improve healthcare, support environmental protection, or help communities understand an issue more clearly. In other words, impactful research should be both high-quality and useful to the world. If research stays locked inside academic circles and never reaches the people who could benefit from it, its real social value may be limited.

Using the ChatGPT 5.5 model as a tool on July 4, 2026, to analyse the 52 research proposals submitted to the Research Grants Council (RGC) by SBUS of HSUHK during the past 3 years, we explore how relevant our research proposals are to society. Our keywords for relevance include “society, business, sustainability, or industrial practice”. The statistics reveal that 25 proposals (48.1%) were identified as having the potential to create impacts beyond academia. The proportion of impactful research proposals increased from 30.0% in 2024/25 to 50.0% in 2025/26 and 53.6% in 2026/27, suggesting a growing emphasis on research with practical and societal relevance.

Research impact, on the other hand, is more about how research is being used as a foundation to conduct future research in the academic world.

While there are measures, the basic idea is to look at citations (both quality and quantity) of published research works in academic journals. It often refers to things like citation numbers, journal rankings, impact factors, and downloads. These numbers can be helpful because they show whether research is being noticed and used by other researchers. The research impact of SBUS is reflected in the scholarly output with an increasing number of publications. From Jan 1, 2024, to April 10, 2026, SBUS colleagues reached a satisfactory level of research performance, publishing 4 papers from the UTD journal list, 3 from the FT50 list, 16 A* papers, and 50 A papers from the ABDC list. As of May 13, 2026, over 40% of SBUS academic staff achieved an h-index of 4 and above by Scopus, among which, over half of them achieved 8 and greater. While you may not know much about the difficulty or the recognition in publishing papers in the journal lists of UTD, FT50, and the ABDC, please be assured that these are the most difficult and prestigious academic benchmarks used by top universities in the world to give tenure and promotion to their academic staff.