High school research journals

There are various journals that publish papers by high school students. Some examples are given below.

Journal of Student Research (High School Edition). According to the information in their website, this journal accepts submissions in multiple disciplines, publishing both research and review articles. It has open access and the authors retain the copyright to their work. There is a acharge of 50 US dollars at submission and of 300 US dollars after an editorial decision is made.

International Journal of High School Research (IJHSR). According to the information in their website, all papers published by IJHSR are indexed internationally by Google Scholar, which makes them available to be searched easily around the world. IJHSR publishes articles of high quality by high school students in all areas of science; it publishes both research or review articles in six issues each year; it has a rolling admission without a deadline and has an open access to public. Submission is free. There is a publication fee of 250 US dollars.

These are peer review journals, which means that the submitted papers are reviewed by referees in order to decide whether they are accepted or rejected for publication; they often provide feedback and suggest or request some improvements before acceptance. Papers published in peer review journals are usually considered more rigorous and thus could give a better impression of the presented results. Generally, journals require that submitted papers are not already published in another journal and are not under review in other journals. The review process could take a few or several months. This means that you must carefully choose a journal to submit according to your circumstances, for example, your deadlines, motivations for a publication, etc.

Papers published in high school journals could be review papers or research papers. Review papers discuss in depth a subject and do not need to provide any new results. Research papers need to include new results originating from research. The standard of novelty of results in high school papers is understandably not as high as in professional research journals where researchers with a PhD (or pursuing one) publish their results. This does not mean that a student cannot publish in one of these professional researh journals. But realistically, this is very rare; it usually applies to PhD students and less often to master students and undergraduate students; and in these cases the paper is usually a collaboration led by a professional researcher with enough experience, where the student has made enough contributions to be included as a coauthor.

Useful resources for doing and writing research

The arXiv is a free archive for scholarly articles in various areas of science. Papers in the arXiv are not peer reviewed. Uploading a paper to the arXiv for the first time required the endorsement of an arXiv author. Many researchers in science upload their preprint papers to the arXiv or other preprint websites, differing from their journal version merely in the format. Thus, the arXiv and other preprint websites are a great resource to access freely most modern papers in science. We strongly discourage you to pay journals for access to their published papers, as they are very expensive, and the arXiv papers (or other preprints) are sufficient.

Google Scholar is a free web search engine for scholarly articles. You can search papers on a particular topic, or written by a particular author. You can see the numbers of papers citing an article and follow that list, wihch is very helpful to find litterature relevant to your research project. You can also click the button "all N versions" and possibly find a link to a freely accesible PDF version of the paper, for exmaple, in the arXiv (see below).

Google Patents is a free web search engine for patent applications. You can search by topic or by author.

Mathematica and MATLAB are software to perform numerical computing. These can be useful when analytical solutions are not possible, or very difficult to obtain. These are not free, but perhaps your school or institution has licenses to any of these that you can use. Coding in these software is relatively easy to learn. Here is a MATLAB tutorial aimed for ages 12+.

Scipy Lecture Notes are free notes to learn numerics, science and data with Python programming language

Inkscape is a free graphics editor. You can create images in inkscape and then integrate them into your documents, for example, using LaTeX.

Overleaf is a free cloud-based LaTeX editor used for writing scientific documents.  LaTeX is a free software system for typesetting documents. There are diffirent editors and compilers for LaTeX, which can be installed in your computer. Overleaf is particularly useful as it can be accessed from the web without having to install any programs in your computer; it also allows a group of colleagues to edit a document simultanesouly and to add comments in a discussion about the editing process. If you have never used LaTex, you can easily find documentation online about how to use it. Also, by using templates, you do not need to start from scratch. Many professional research journals are typed in LaTeX.