Publishing research is an amazing achievement for highschool students, in part because of how hard the process is. Research publication revolves around understanding and contributing new information to a specific field, which can be quite daunting for students who don’t have experience or direct guidance.
We’ve written articles which approach how to write a research paper, and what publishers look for when reviewing papers. In this article, we’ll give you an insider’s view as to what publishing research looks like and means, and how that varies between kinds of publications and between disciplines. This knowledge comes from our research mentors, who are PhDs with long years of research and publication experience across numerous disciplines. Let’s get started!
The Kinds of Publication and Presentation
When we discuss publishing research, we use that as an umbrella term for how research can be disseminated to others in the field, and contribute to the broader pool of knowledge. This can be done in multiple ways; we’ll cover each below, along with notes on how accessible each is to students.
Books
From pop science to textbooks, these are the ultimate expression of research. Professors will spend years working on books, and the amount of effort, original research, and editing required puts them beyond the reach of high school students. For many fields, books are only used to try to popularize concepts otherwise confined to professional circulations.
Peer-Reviewed Journals
These are the backbone of all academic research. Not all journals are created equal, but for most fields (more on that later), research results are published in journals so they can be read and understood by other researchers in that field. These publications are peer reviewed, which means they are critiqued and edited by other experts in the same field. This is seen as a safeguard against poorly designed or conducted research, and ensures the validity of the field. Although anyone can submit their manuscript to any journal, each journal has its own set of criteria and expectations when it comes to the subject matter, type of research (i.e. clinical vs basic), or difficulty. Therefore, journals do not publish all submissions. Not all journals will accept submissions from students, but many will, so long as the research meets their high standards.
Feldschrifts
These are collections of articles which would normally be published in a journal, but are instead published as a book in honor of someone, usually an extremely senior and well regarded researcher in a field. These revolve around a theme, and articles are solicited from notable researchers in the field. These are not open to submissions; we include them here for the sake of completeness.
Preprints
We delve more into what preprints are, and how they function, in another article. To sum up; preprints are akin to journal articles, but are not peer reviewed prior to their publication. For this reason, they are not well regarded in many fields.
Conferences
Conferences are meetings of researchers and others in a field, organized around a central theme. These have keynote addresses, sessions which give talks on specific issues, and poster presentations. As an example, a wildlife ecology conference may focus on invasive species one year. One session at that conference may be on aquatic invasive species. The poster presentation hall may be divided into sections, for research projects focusing on different themes around the central topic.
The keynote presentations from a conference will be collected and published in a volume. These are the conference proceedings, which do take some time to publish. Some conferences include only keynote presentations or select poster presentations in their proceedings; in some instances, this is field specific.
An oral or paper presentation at a conference is a prepared lecture on a topic related to the theme of the conference. Keynote speakers are invited, but all other speakers may join by submitting a proposal. These are evaluated and selected by organizers of the conference. Proposals not selected for an oral presentation are typically presented as a poster. Poster presentations allow you to hang a poster, and, at designated times, spend time explaining the poster to other conference attendees or judges. An open call for poster abstracts allows for wide submissions for posters. These are a popular choice for undergraduates and high school students.
Notes on Writing and Publishing
These are a collection of notes which we think are relevant to publishing research, and which are somewhat consistent across disciplines (with exceptions discussed in the next section).
Coauthors
Almost no papers are published on their own. Coauthorships are used to apportion the credit for work done, and to make sure everyone who contributed is properly acknowledged. If you write the paper, you are one author. If you have a research mentor advising you, no matter if you did all the work writing the paper, they will be listed as a coauthor due to their guidance, intellectual contributions, and editing.
This continues at all levels of research. Whichever professor is the principal investigator in a lab always gets listed as a coauthor on any paper published by that lab. A graduate student’s advisor is listed as a coauthor on almost any paper a graduate student publishes. A paper published by a research lab will list any researcher who contributes to that paper as a coauthor, regardless of job title or level of contribution. Oftentimes, large papers have multiple labs collaborating together, which can lead to long author lists across multiple institutions or even countries.
Papers which are not based on original research, such as metaanalyses or reinterpretations of existing data often have fewer coauthors. This is also the case for research papers on more theoretical topics, such as math or some branches of physics. These often require a degree of collaboration, but not the amount as needed in lab or field research.
Citations
All research is built off of prior research. Every piece of knowledge or fact that is known was first discovered or reported by someone. Even if you ask novel questions and find novel results, people have asked similar questions before, and it is proper to acknowledge them. Citations come in several different forms:
- In text citations: these appear within the text itself, usually in brackets or parentheses or brackets, and reference sources very briefly.
- Footnotes. These are noted in the text, and appear at the bottom of the page. These are used to cite sources, and on occasion to include notes the author found relevant, but tangential to the current discussion of the text.
- Endnotes. They’re like footnotes, but all at the end of the text instead.
- Bibliography. These are required alongside whichever kind of citations you use . This is a list of every source used, either in alphabetical order or in the order they are referenced in the publication.
There are multiple correct styles of citation; which you should use depends on where you are publishing or presenting your research. Each has their own requirements so you need to check the exact requirements of the conference or journal you are submitting to. For example, UChicago prefers Chicago style citations.
Nuances by Field
There is an assumption that publishing academic research looks similar regardless of the field. This is inaccurate. While the basics are the same across fields, each has their own quirks. We can’t detail every nuance of every field of research, so we’ll focus on some of the most popular for students, which have intricacies that often trip them up.
Biology
The writing in biology (and scientific research generally) is quite different from the writing you need to do in high school, or from the kind of writing used in other research papers. This is one reason why working with a research mentor is usually important for crafting these papers. By leveraging their experience and knowledge, you can write in the style expected by professionals.
Biology research papers often have a lot of coauthors. Anyone who contributed to data collection/analysis or reagents/materials must be listed. The professor who supervises the lab you are working in is always the final coauthor listed. This can lead to research papers with a lot of listed coauthors, even if the paper was actually only written by one or two of them.
Finally, biology papers often have extensive bibliographies, even compared to other fields. In the most extreme cases, articles can have a bibliography longer than the paper itself. This is due to the need to cite all related research done on the question before, and the rapid pace of publishing in biology.
Economics
It is very hard to get published in economics journals. Tenured professors publish around one article per year, which is very low when compared to other academic disciplines. The publication process also tends to be very long, even when compared with other fields. You can expect to take at least six months between submission and any possible publication.
Computer Science
Computer science is the fastest field in terms of innovation, due to the speed at which technology evolves. This means that conferences are more prestigious than journals for CS, which is the reverse of every other field. While journal publications exist, most research is presented at conferences, to make sure results are disseminated before becoming obsolete.
In addition, this makes preprints more valuable in CS research. The most respected researchers often only publish in preprints. That said, most researchers still prefer conferences as venues to showcase their research.
Math
Writing books for professional consumption is more common in math than many other fields. This is because the length of proofs needed for some mathematical research is extensive enough that publishing them as a paper is infeasible. Math papers do exist, and are as prestigious as any other field, but publishing books is more common at higher levels of math.
Final Thoughts
Research is a complex thing to complete, with many field-specific nuances. We hope this insider’s guide has given you a solid introduction to what publishing research entails, and how it can look different based on the field you’re working in. While these differences aren’t as severe for high school students, they do still impact publishing research at that level.
Doing research is hard, especially on your own. The way academia is set up, students progress through stages of mentorship as they get more involved with research and gain more experience and knowledge; that’s why graduate students all have advisors. If you want an advisor for your own research, you should check out our research mentorships. These are great opportunities for students in high school to pursue and publish original research. Schedule a free consultation today to learn how we can help you.
