What's the difference between research quality and research impact?

A paper can be rigorous and go nowhere, or influential and flawed. Quality is an internal property: do the methods support the claims? Impact is external: does the work change practice, policy, or subsequent research? Conflating them is how bad signals creep in: citation counts, the usual stand-in for both, mostly track attention rather than soundness (Eyre-Walker & Stoletzki 2013), and societal impact involves outputs, uses, and benefits that citations don't capture at all (Bornmann 2013). The responsible-metrics literature makes the same point: no single indicator should stand in for the several distinct things "good research" can mean (Hicks et al. 2015). Nabu scores them on separate frameworks — so a high-quality niche paper and a lower-quality widely-used one don't collapse into one misleading number.