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Museum workers believe that museums are critical vectors for social change. The 2022 ICOM definition of museums made claimed that museums are necessary for fixing social wrongs, paths for cultural diplomacy, and venues for advancing a sustainable future. Unfortunately, there seems to be a scarcity of evidence to back up these social impact claims. An effort to synthesize research in the USA published in the first two decades of the 21st century sought to describe what can be considered common understanding in the museum field about how social issues and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) come together in museum practice. Our study focused on the methods and data reporting: we examined where claims may overshoot what should be considered generalizable fact. To do that, we analyzed a subset of papers assembled through a configurative review of the Museums, STEM, and Social Issues domain in the USA.1 The initial review described the topics and types of research related to our focal subject. Here, we focus on the choices made about the research methods. By selecting only those papers that assessed the intersection of STEM and social issues in museums, we were able to look across three primary sources of knowledge: peer-reviewed journals, grey literature from a national online repository, and dissertations or theses in the ProQuest database. We used these reports to understand whether there is sufficient evidence to make claims about the museum sector or museums as a class capable of supporting the many claims about their impacts. In this case, we focused only on museums’ capacity to use STEM to engage audiences with social issues and acknowledge the exclusion of humanities content as a path for social change. 

This research synthesizes recent literature about the ways the informal learning field is engaging with social issues, with a specific focus on the position of STEM knowledge in those efforts. Through a systematic review of peer-reviewed articles, research reports, and graduate theses, we found many topics highly ranked in public surveys were being addressed, with many notable exceptions. Much of the research examined presents social issues isolated from complex, intertwined societal structures, although some emerging efforts did focus on the societal context of social issues. Our analysis suggests a strong role for the field as knowledge brokers for understanding social issues but also a need to broaden the range of topics and to more deliberately and transparently include the societal context and structural nature of social issues. The review concludes with a call for more cross-disciplinary and cross-sector efforts.