Speaker 1: Are you bored out of your mind? Are you trying to get off your ass and do something productive for once? And finally, are you wondering how high school students like me even get to publish research? Yeah. If you said yes, keep watching. Hey, it's Hailey. Today, I'm going to talk about how I was able to publish my very own scientific research in high school at the age of 17. Here's the thing. I never imagined that I'd be able to conduct and publish my very own research, let alone do that in high school. I had to figure out how to do that largely on my own. So in this video, I'm hoping to walk you through the process of publishing your own research as a high school student and hopefully make it easier for you. So I'll start by talking about my own research. My paper was about the structure and the strength of crumpled paper and the different factors that affect it. My paper is published by the Journal of Emerging Investigators, which is an academic journal, I think based in Boston, that helps publish papers by middle school and high school students. So the reason I decided to publish my own research was because I remember reading news about high school students being able to publish their own research. I remember thinking, wow, how the heck did they do that? It was around this time last year, so I was still in quarantine. When we were able to go back to school in person last May, I went up to my physics teacher and I was like, do you know much about publishing research from high school students? And he was like, not really. I've never heard of anyone in our school publishing research. Why? I don't know. I just read something about crumpled paper and I thought it'd be pretty cool to do something with it. Yeah, sure. Go ahead. So that's basically what happened. I just wrote my manuscript. I submitted it to the Journal of Emerging Investigators. After we went through the scientific review process, it got published. If you're interested, my research paper is on their website. I'll put the link down below. So this begs the question, how did I do it? First of all, do your own research and find journals that accept research papers from high school students. So although I got published by the Journal of Emerging Investigators, the editors were amazing, highly recommend, not sponsored. I wish it was, but it's not. There are also quite a few other journals that do accept research papers from high school students. Those include the Journal of Student Research High School Edition, the International Journal of High School Research. There are also two student-led ones. The first one is the Young Global Scientists Journal, which I am actually a part of. I'm one of the science editors for that journal, and we don't just publish STEM research. We also publish papers in science, social science, and the arts. And another student-run journal I came across is called the Young Scientists Journal, and all of them will be linked down below as well. This is probably the part that will take the longest. Write your manuscript. I know a lot of high school students, they conduct research under a professor at a local university. I personally didn't do this because I live in China, so I assumed that a lot of the local universities in my area would publish research in Chinese, which, um... Look, I can speak in Chinese, I can write in Chinese to some extent, but if you ask me to write a research paper in Chinese... No, thank you. So I wrote my paper by myself, and I conducted the experiments just in my school's science lab under my physics teacher's supervision. After you've written and submitted your manuscript, you'll just have to wait for a few weeks until you hear back. After pre-review, the editors will let you know on what changes you need to make in terms of the overall organization of your paper. For example, I had to move my methodology section to the very end, which is how JEI does it. So they have the materials and methods section at the very end. Once you've made those changes, which it shouldn't take you that long, just resubmit your manuscript and wait to hear back. After scientific review, which is probably the longest part of the whole review process, you'll receive a decision on whether your manuscript was accepted or rejected. Mine was accepted pending scientific and presentation changes, and I also received like a full-on five-page letter on all the changes I had to make. First, scientific changes, and presentation changes. I remember it seemed very daunting to me at first when I saw all the changes I had to make, but honestly, don't be scared, because the reviewers and editors are there just to make sure your paper is the best that it can possibly be. Once you receive the letter, the editor will also let you know what the deadline is to resubmit. So yeah, make those changes and just resubmit. You might have to go through multiple rounds of scientific review depending on the individual paper, but I was lucky in that after one round of scientific review, my paper was approved for copy editing. You'll receive like a full-on annotated document with a bunch of comments and suggestions on it, most of which you just have to approve, but some you might have to add stuff to it just to improve the overall organization of your paper. Once you have resubmitted your manuscript and it has been approved for publication, you'll receive a PDF proof of the completed manuscript just for you to review and approve it. This process is just mainly for you to find any minor errors such as typos or punctuation, and once those have been fixed, your paper is ready for publication. The whole process took me around six months from May to November 2020, and I was just ecstatic once I realized I had actually been published as a high schooler at the age of 17. I'm also the first student in my school to have published research, so that was pretty cool. I just think it's so fulfilling to be able to challenge yourself and accomplish something that usually only people in their 20s or 30s accomplish. I hope this video was helpful, and I also hope this might encourage you to start your own research project. If you liked this video or you thought it was helpful, do leave a like and a comment down below, and subscribe if you want to see more. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.