How I Published 3 Research Papers in High School (secrets revealed)

the first paper I published in high school took me 2 years the third paper I published took me 4 months I've wanted to make this video for years because of how useful it would have been to have this guide when I was in high school now in all honesty I love research that's why I had such a commitment to it in high school and why it was the focus of so many of my extracurriculars you might not enjoy research like that and that's totally fine but you can't deny the impact having something like a research

publication has for your college application it provides an amazing amount of credibility to the research that you're doing especially if you're doing independent research having a paper is like the college's way of guaranteeing that you actually did the work and it had some kind of real world impact it was meaningful and it's an achievement you can put on your resume for years to come the next time you're applying for an internship whether that's later in high school whether that's some kind of research position in college you can reference this paper that you wrote as a

basis for saying look I know the research process I've gone through it Professor please give me this opportunity now let's start by talking about the types of papers and breaking down some myths I've never actually seen any other YouTuber EXP explain things from the fundamentals like this probably cuz they're Bots but don't worry I got you there are two broad categories of research papers that you can write the first is a review article which is essentially going over information that already exists out there so for example you might have heard of a literature review which

is essentially a paper that's compiling information from a bunch of other papers in a field now literature reviews are useful for scientists right if you're getting into a field you're trying to get to know things you want to see what research has already been done who's pushing the frontiers of what but if you're just thinking along practically here all the author of a lit review is doing is compiling the information that's out there now this is actually a pretty common form of paper writing for high school students because it's a nice way to get your

introduction into how the research process works you'll actually get a publication under your belt you'll understand the process better but with that being said you're not actually doing any research here the same thing goes for expository articles which basically teach like an introduction to a field these are usually not published in super high-fi journals or maybe there'll be like one really really well- written paper that is but as a high school student this is just something to get the gears in your head going right it's one possible way that you could write a paper the

bottom line here is that writing a review article is it's not that hard it's also not that impressive it's like the first level of research real research papers come when you write an empirical article now empirical studies actually push the frontiers of research forward it's when you do some kind of a study some kind of an experiment and you come to a finding which you then report about it's on an experiment that no one else has done before and the finding is genuinely meaningful to the scientific Community now sometimes you do research and it's unsuccessful

it doesn't work or it goes against your hypothesis that's also fine but the key here is that it's pushing the frontiers of a field forward it's something someone hasn't done before the findings even if they're unsuccessful could be useful to someone in the future now if you want to get started on research and you're curious about where to find Opportunities watch these two videos on my channel I feel like this video is almost taking things like one step higher it's like when you have an opportunity how do you really get the most out of it

how do you publish a paper but I'll also give you a bonus tip here when it comes to Empirical research one of of the other things that you can get involved in is database studies in my research guide I talk about how doing more coding oriented projects just lends itself better to high school students wanting to pursue independent research because you have the ability to control what you're doing it's all on you you don't need to go to a lab and like do physical experiments on mice there's another thing you definitely want to keep in

mind when it comes to college admissions if you're interested in applying to like top tier IV universities uh bsmd programs any kind of like research heavy uh major or School you should absolutely be doing Empirical research aside from you just getting more science and Hands-On exposure this is the type of thing that would 100% come up at an interview and if on your college application you're like boasting about having four papers and your interviewer shows up to the interview thinking oh this guy's like a research expert he has four papers and you have to admit

to them on the spot there that they were all literature reviews they didn't actually contribute anything you didn't really do much or learn much that's not a great look you don't want to be in that position so understand what your desires are in the future and then account for that I think database studies can also be treated very similarly but they don't always require coding experience it's more about finding observations within a data set seeing if there's something new there and then publishing about it now before you even publish a paper you need to figure

out two things what the research topic is going to be and where you going to do the research are you going to conduct research at a college in a lab are you going to do it as part of an internship there's a lot of different ways that you can spin off a project that you're already doing as part of something like an internship into a publication where it's more self-directed from you but you keep your internship uh contact or professor college professor in this case as a mentor for you another question that comes up a

lot for people that aren't able to secure internships is is joining something like a a research program worth it now there's a huge range of research programs some of them are really well done where you just like submit an application and you go to some class and you get matched up with a college professor other ones make you pay a certain amount of money I'm never an advocate for having to pay thousands of dollars to go do research but with that being said with some of these programs if you have the financial resources you're like

in that group of people who just doesn't have any opportunity but you're willing to spend like a couple Grand to fly out to Berkeley and do some research look at the end of the day they're going to handhold you through the entire research process they're going to give you some good research to do you're going to publish something to keep in mind now regardless of where you do your research even if you do it independently which is an option it's literally what I did you need to have a mentor this is one of the biggest

mistakes I made when I first started doing research if you want to publish in a better quality Journal a journal that's a little bit more established they will not let you just so ol Doo published this paper as a high school student for the sake of your own credibility they will force you to have someone backing your research even if you literally did the entire project by yourself my main area of research when I was in high school was epilepsy and when I was in around junior year I wrote a really really good quality paper

that I wanted to get published I sent this paper to a journal on my own and they even accepted it but when they came time to doing the revisions they were so hellbent on me having a mentor they refused to publish the paper unless I had a mentor that was also authored and was with me through the the revision process now don't just avoid the mistakes that I made here we can be even smarter than that if you're working on Independent research or you're trying to write a paper and you need someone to fill this

Mentor role one of the best things you can do is to take the research you're doing kind of summarize it into a paragraph and then reach out to college professors who are conducting research in this same field they can be at literally any college because all you want to do is meet with them virtually and build up a relationship that way tell them that you'd love to get on a call with them and just talk a little bit about your research run some ideas by them and see what they think eventually you can build up

a relationship with them and have them be like a Mentor for you but I'm telling you you are way more likely to get success this way than just like cold approaching College professors for internship opportunities because you're already doing the research College professors love working with high school students who are a lot more self-directed and independent in that way you can do your research independently it's all on you but whenever you hit roadblocks along the way now you have like an adult in the field who's working who you can like kind of reference they can

give you tips things like that and of course they'll be very happy to Mentor you with like your research paper writing process cuz at the end of the day they just get to have another author spot on your paper they're being authored here worst case if this college professor strategy just doesn't work out go ask your high school teacher if you ask like your high school science teacher if they'd be willing to Mentor you a little bit with this just have them do like the basics right review your paper be authored on it this is

your way of building up a relationship to the point where you could ask them for a recck letter this just a whole another angle if one thing doesn't work out make the most of another strategy I'm not going to get too into actually like writing and drafting the paper because there's a ton of resources online on exactly how to do that instead let's talk about the practicals let's say you have an nice draft for your paper what do you need to do before you can actually just get it shipped off to a journal now here's

an important tip to keep in mind I haven't gotten exactly into like the types of journals and whatnot but there are certain High School journals that if you want to publish with them they ask you to have like peers in the field like college professor level people who understand the research going on have them edit and review your paper as part of the revision process they ask you to have like three to four experts anate your paper and then send it to them as proof that like your manuscript is actually of good quality and people

in the field are endorsing it isn't the norm for all journals but it's something that can happen at a high school level so just keep in mind what a journal's requirements are before you submit your manuscript the next thing we need to talk about is one of the most important parts of this video how do you choose a journal to submit your paper to does the journal quality matter let's take a step back here and just think about things from a higher level college application sense you are not a PhD researcher or a college professor

who wants to publish their groundbreaking work in the top-of-the-line Journal you are very likely hear a high school student who just wants to get their first publication under their belt there are a ton of more Reasons I'm going to get into in a second but just as a first understand that colleges are going to be looking at your application for maybe 10 minutes within that they're going to see your research they may focus on it for a minute or two within that minute or two you've probably talked a little bit about what your research was

maybe in the additional information section you gave them the title of it do you think that they're going to take the time to look at the exact Journal that you publish in understand the context within the field of how meaningful that was check out how many citations your paper has who the other authors were how impactful it was for the field probably not now if you do have fantastic level research that you've worked on for years it's backed by college professors absolutely go for a publication in a top tier well-known Journal if that's something that

even the professors you're working with are endorsing you to do because you genuinely might have a chance but if this is your first attempt at a research paper and you want to have a a better likelihood of being able to publish do it in a more like convenient faster time period and just get your first step into this process before maybe your second or third paper where you publish in something a lot more high-fi then by all means you can publish in a high school level Journal now like the name suggests a high school Journal

is a journal that's open to students typically in the high school or even like the high end of Middle School level and there are some journals that within this range are fantastic now one of the journals I've mentioned before and I've personally published in is ji the Journal of emerging investigators now this is not like a sponsor segment or anything I genuinely believe that ji is is a great High School Journal it's run by Harvard graduate students they don't just accept every paper you need to have like a manuscript at a really good quality it

needs to go through their thorough review process it can take months to do it's just like publishing in an actual Journal but it's at a high school level where if you're doing research that is more independent or it's like kind of your you're getting more into the process this makes more sense for you now even within High School journals there are tiers right I consider ji to be a much more rigorous process there are other journals out there like for example um jsr that's another one um there's a ton of them that you can just

kind of go online and Google that are at different levels some of them are easier to publish in which typically makes them a little bit lower quality others like ji are much more rigorous with their review process and they are naturally higher quality now I also want to emphasize that there is a big difference between actually going through the process of publishing in a journal and just taking a research paper that you wrote and throwing it up on like your personal website and calling it a paper my friend that is not a publication because you

didn't publish nothing got published it didn't actually get out there in the world you just threw it up somewhere do not go on your college application and start talking about oh I have paper I have paper colleges will call you out for that okay actually you actually do need to go through the publication process in order to say that you have a published paper once You' submitted your paper to a journal there are a couple different outcomes for what happens next I've been using this terminology like Loosely in the video Let's just Define it right

here your paper can either be accepted or rejected if your paper is rejected well then that's pretty obvious that just mean the journal didn't like it and that's another reason why if you're submitting to like these really top dear journals imagine you submit to like nature.com or like i e like really well-known established journals there's a very good likelihood that as a high schooler if you're submitting that paper that they're going to reject you for a multitude of reasons either the research isn't at the level they're looking for they don't believe it's actually like meaningful

enough to the field there's a ton of different reasons for it um but if you do get rejected then there is a chance that you can always like reapply for some high school level journalists they can give you like feedback even for like top level journalists they'll give you feedback on exactly why they're rejecting you and with that you can take that feedback into consideration you can work on your research some more and you can always resubmit to these journals in some cases they may also like fully reject you and just say like Hey we're

like there's nothing you can do about it we just don't want to accept this paper because of the way that the study is structured that's fine just go on to another Journal now on the flip side let's say you get accepted well then that's great news that's fantastic getting accepted doesn't mean for certain that you're going to get published but it means that there's a really really good likelihood at this stage they've accepted your paper to be published pending a mixed set of revisions that needs to happen they've accepted you for the P review where

now they're going to have a bunch of people go through your paper in detail and then Mark it all up and then the next step from here is that over the following you know weeks to months they're going to keep sending you drafts of your paper with updates things they want you to change graphs figures things like that you're going to go through on your end and as fast as you can make those changes and send it back to them so you can streamline your paper getting published another kind of brutal truth about publishing papers

is that getting Publications takes time from when you're accepted to when you're published takes months I think the average of what they say like on Google is that it takes about 6 months as a high schooler doing your first paper it can take even longer longer than that for me when I published my very first paper it took me around a year from when I was accepted to when I got published and even just to get accepted for my very first paper took me around 8 months which is kind of crazy however like I mentioned

at the start of the video by the time I got to my third paper I understood the process way way better and so when I submitted my paper to a journal it got accepted like that the revision process was way faster and within 4 months I was just able to get it done and published now when you see people who have like 5 10 Publications it seems super crazy crazy like in your head you're like oh my God that's so much effort especially going through just one writing one paper takes so much time how do

they end up having 10 papers here's the kind of like industry hidden secret to that those 10 papers are on all very similar topics to one another once you get really into a field and you start doing research you understand what the next steps of your own research work are going to be what are different angles I can use to to to tackle this problem is there maybe a literature review that you could just compile on the same field you're already so knowledgeable about once you start drafting up those in sending those papers in it's

a lot easier to start racking up these papers like numerically now as a high schooler I don't think that's like the best College admission strategy I don't think that like numbers-wise you need to rack up 50 papers but more try to have that good quality research paper that if it comes up in something like an interview or whatnot or you want to write about it in your college application you can go into more depth about the actual research you did why it was meaningful and a college understands that if you make it through this entire

process of publishing a paper that's huge but I also as a bonus tip a hug huge advocate for smart college application building seriously consider competing in science FS once you already have the paper published it is not that much more work to put your information into like a presentation trifold poster board or whatever your local science fa accepts and then go ahead and submit in the fall and see if you can go present your work and win some kind of award you've already done the research it's worth the time to go and compete this is

how you can go on to compete at ISF at an international level win awards win thousands of dollars in both cash prizes and sponsorships there's a lot of potential here I know that I've been promising that Science Fair Video Guide for a while it was one of my main extracurriculars in high school trust me in these next couple weeks I got you okay I'm coming through with it if you have more questions on publishing papers follow me on Instagram and DM me or just leave them in the comments below and I'll go through and like

see if I can respond to a couple thank you all so much for watching this has been prik like always peace