Speaker 1: Hey everyone, my name is Rishabh and today I'm going to talk about how you can do research in high school and even potentially get published. Now before we get started, I do want to say that there's an absurd amount of misinformation on YouTube and honestly just things that are objectively like false by people like other high school students who don't necessarily have any research published. And so I wanted to clear that up. Now, how can you trust me? I'm a high schooler, I'm a high school senior, and through my high school journey, I have worked on multiple research projects. I've done independent projects, projects with labs, projects in formal research programs, and through those I've gotten multiple preprints and formal research publications in like graduate level peer reviewed journals. And so I wanted to share my experiences and share all the things that I've learned over the last like seven, eight years of doing science. And so also in my experiences in high school, I participated in the International Science and Engineering Fair, other research competitions and symposiums. And there I've met amazing high school students who are doing research in their own ways. And so I've kind of taken all of that information and I've combined it into one guide, one video that you can trust. So that's a weird flex, but okay, now I'm going to tell you the secret sauce. So first I'm going to get into how you can actually get the research opportunity. Many of us are high school students. We don't have a lab right next to us. And so how do you get started in the first place? Then I'm going to talk about doing the research, like what are some things that are really important for high schoolers, especially to focus on? You have this general idea that, oh, I need to do the background methodology, then results and then conclusions. Right. But like what, what do you actually need to focus on there? Then step three, I'm going to talk about writing a paper. I think papers are incredibly important and develops your scientific communication skills and also ultimately leads to publication, which is the culmination of your research work where you really get to share the newfound knowledge that you have and the things that you learn with other people, with the science community. And that's the power of research. And so I'm going to talk about all those four steps, what you need to do. Let's get started with step number one, getting the research opportunity. So point A here is I wanted to start out with independent work. I have other ways you can get research opportunities, but independent work is totally valid. Like I had certain passion projects, certain things that I was really interested in STEM. And so I was able to explore those through completely like independent research with, you know, very little initially, very little feedback necessarily from like experts and mentors. And so independent research is totally valid. Like you don't need to work with a professor. You don't need to work on someone else's project necessarily. And so independent research is totally valid. I had one paper that started as an independent research project. And then later I was able to collaborate with experts in order to validate and publish this research. Point B here is cold emailing and working with a lab. This is really helpful because in the lab environment, you learn from PhD students, from postdocs, from your PI. And there's just, you know, by getting yourself surrounded by other people who are professionals in research and like know what they're doing, it's really helpful. And so by doing this, I was able to get two papers done. And so basically I led this project that the lab, like they had an idea, I led the project. And then the work that I did, it ended up getting used in other studies that the lab was working on. And those papers got published. I'm still working on my study in order to complete that and get that published as well. But you know, this is another really valid way to get and learn the skills that you need. But at the same time, I do want to stress that something that's really important in the lab setting is like literature reviews and learning the field and, you know, weekly like lab meetings and things like that. You can join those without necessarily having to work on a research project. So I've heard about labs from people that I know in the research, like high school research community. You know, they've been in labs where they just attend a weekly meeting to learn about the field, learn about projects they're interested in, to hear from the other like grad students in the lab, what work are they doing? And then slowly as they build the knowledge up, then one day they're like, hey, grad student, can I like collaborate on your project? Is there something I can do like, or can I work on this data analysis piece or something like that? So that's totally like valid. You don't need to necessarily get started with a project straight away. You don't need to send an email to professors saying like, here's my project idea, or can I please work on a project like you can also say, hey, can I attend your weekly lab meetings like over Zoom or something just to get an idea? And so I think that's really helpful. Point C here is formal research programs. And so I currently have one preprint from a formal research program. I only did one. And this was this last summer at the Research Science Institute, which is hosted by the Center for Excellence in Education and MIT. And so I did research at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Ocean Science. And so my project wasn't actually in either of those areas, but that was the mentorship I received. So I worked on brain tumor modeling with deep learning. And so it's more of like a comp bio, comp pathology type research project. And so in this research, it was really helpful to have mentors who were dedicated, like they volunteered for the formal research program to have like a student work under them. And so mentors are more generally like they will be very helpful in these types of formal research programs because, you know, other scientists will be extremely busy, right? If you contact a professor, they're going to be incredibly busy. And so if they've volunteered their time for the research program, then they're going to spend that time with you. And so I feel like the structure and kind of help you will receive through a formal research program can definitely be like better than what you might receive doing like, of course, an independent project or even contacting a lab or like cold emailing or whatever. And so formal research programs are really great. I've made an entire video on how you can apply to a research science institute. And I'll link that in the description below. That being said, I have a ton of more tips. I have like literally a 17 minute video guide, like with full templates and resources and everything on how you can get research opportunities and internships in high school. And so you can watch that at the end of this video. I'll put it up on the screen at the very end. So just go watch that next after this one. All right. Step number two is to actually do your research project. And so this I'm focusing on the points that are really important for other high school students and for other people who are, you know, like, like, not necessarily experts in research. And so point A here is you need to spend an absurd amount of time on the literature review. You know, you should not be spending just like one day reading some papers and then immediately jumping into your research. You need to take a bunch of notes and spend a bunch of time on your literature review, because this is probably a new field. You're probably learning things from every single paper you're reading and finding like 100 terms you don't know in every single paper that you're reading. And so this is a snapshot from my research that I did at the RSI program this last summer. And so as you can see, this was July 5th. This was like, I think when I was getting into my literature review, like deep into the literature review. And so I would list these papers, I would, you know, make notes on every single paper. And then at the end, before like starting my research, before or before starting the methodology, before writing up my draft paper, I reviewed all of these notes, reviewed all of the literature review again, because this is just really important. And also, you can use this tool called Mendeley or Mendeley. And so as you can see, I have this thumbnail over here, I'll link this also in the description below. And so basically, Mendeley is this amazing tool that will save you so much time when doing your literature review, because it basically allows you to save all your references and all of your papers in one spot. So later when you're writing your paper, it becomes really easy. Point B here is to learn the skills that you need based on the literature review. So people often like I often get emails from people who are like, oh, I took this Python course and now I want to do research, like what should I do research in? So it's like, I feel like you should be doing this other way around. You should first do your literature review, you should read the other papers and see like, okay, they've been using these tools, these programming languages, whatever. And so now I'm going to learn this programming language, I'm going to learn this tool, I'm going to learn how to like, look at proteins on my screen, whatever you need to do. And so when I was first doing my literature review, I learned like, hey, this field of natural language processing will be really helpful. Like I already had some experience in machine learning, I had experience in Python and MATLAB. And so now I wanted to jump into NLP for my next research project. And so before starting that one, this is the research project that I'd say like is probably the biggest in my high school journey. It's what I won the International Science and Engineering Fair with and got a first author paper from. And so I watched literally like 25 hours plus, like each of these is an hour and 30 minutes or something. I was like over 24 hours of lectures on NLP on YouTube before starting the research. And so the summer before, like this is what I was grinding, like I was just watching these videos and they're pretty entertaining too. Like they're just really good lectures from amazing scientists. And so YouTube, blogs, papers, they're all great resources for learning the skills that you need to learn. All right, now point C, try to get a mentor. So I mean, everybody knows that, hey, these are the steps I need to do for my research project. Like after you read the papers, you have your idea, you're like, okay, now I need to work on this. So this is like, you'll know based off of your project of like what you need to do, right? And that's why I'm not just giving you like a list of steps that, okay, first do, you know, uh, first find your data set, then do this, then do this. Because in some projects you don't need to find a data set. You're made, you're like making the data, right? And so that's why I'm just giving you these more, you know, overarching things that you should focus on in your research, um, which is try to get a mentor. And so in middle school, I didn't have a research mentor until like towards the end and like eighth grade. And so I feel like some of my research I could have gotten published like in middle school if I did it with a mentor. Because frankly, like my first two papers, they were not that great. Like in sixth grade when I was writing a research paper, like obviously it's not the quality, it's not like a PhD level quality, it's not a graduate level paper, um, like the type of quality that I'm trying to write right now. And so I feel like it would have been really helpful to have a mentor at that stage to guide me on like, how do I write my paper? And so I feel like having a mentor will help you a lot in the next step, which is the paper writing. But also in the publication piece, because having like, um, another name on your research who can like guide you through how to submit into journals, how to preprint, all those things can be really helpful. And so try to get a mentor. It could be like, you can email, um, local professors, you can email local scientists. If you have a teacher, um, who has some experience with research, if you have like a family connection or like an older sibling who has, um, experience in research, those are all great resources. And, um, I feel like sometimes it's looked down upon that, like, Hey, um, you know, you shouldn't be getting mentored by like your parents or shouldn't be getting mentored by an older sibling or whatever. Right. But at the end of the day, um, they're not doing your project for you. They're just kind of like, they'll, they'll help you in the general thing. Because if you're, if you're a middle schooler, or if you're like a freshman in high school, your writing skills are not going to be, you know, at the same level as like someone who's really experienced in science. And so that's why I feel like getting a mentor can be helpful. Um, but at the same time, as I said, like in middle school, I feel like if I had a mentor, it would have been way more helpful, but you don't need to have the mentor at the same time. And you can learn all the skills that you need to without the mentor, just from your own drive, like on YouTube, online, all that stuff. But these are just some general tips, but now onto the more juicy parts, which is step three, number three, writing the paper. Okay, so point A here is, can this research actually be published? After you finish your project, you need to evaluate like, can this actually get published? Am I like doing a significance study in my field that like has some significance, like has real impacts, has like an actual, um, like result, right? Like it's not just like a completely failed project. And so you need to evaluate, can this be published? Is it on the level of like the papers that I was reading or the preprints that I was reading? Then you also need to decide whether you're going to go after a preprint or a paper. And so the reason why I say this, like if you're, okay, for those of you who are watching, like if you are a, um, if you're an actual researcher, you'll probably be pretty confused because in your mind, it's like preprint or paper. Like what does that mean? It should be preprint and paper, right? Because every paper you write is, you should aim for it to get published. Like why would you stop at the preprint phase? The reason why I say this is because oftentimes like high schoolers research is not at the level to get published in a graduate level journal. And so what I've noticed from like other high schoolers, again, I'm bringing up like, um, my examples and experiences meeting other people at like high school research competitions is that they, they only go to the preprint step because they're not able to get published. Like they don't get past peer review and things like that. Um, and so that's why I'm saying preprint or paper, uh, in addition to that, like what is a preprint? For those of you who are probably really confused, um, a preprint is basically the server that researchers use to share their research and make it widely available before exploring like a research, uh, before like submitting to a journal. Um, and the reason behind that is because the journal process, it can take quite a bit of time. And so they get their name out there, they get their work like out there, like, Oh, we did it first. And also it's like free open access. Anyone can see it can increase the reach of your research as well. So those are a couple of reasons people do preprints. And so you may have heard the server called archive, like ARXIV or bio archive, bio ARXIV, those types of preprint service. Um, so that's how that works. In addition, um, before like writing, you should try to find the journal that you want to submit to. So, uh, or at least a general idea so you can follow their rough guidelines. Like you don't have to follow it piece by piece cause at the end of the day, that's going to get tweaked like before submitting and, uh, before like it gets printed and everything, but like try to generally stick to their style. Like you don't want to be writing in, um, whatever your high school classes, science classes thing, like APA format when the journal is using like Vancouver format or like something else. Um, and then also before writing the paper, I'd recommend redoing your literature review because after doing the research project, you probably will understand the papers way better and you probably will identify some more papers that, you know, are very similar to yours or you didn't realize like they existed. Um, and so this can be helpful. Also ask your mentor and experts if you can, um, on those things like, can I get published? Should I preprint or paper? Things like that. Now, point B here is learning how to write the paper. If you're a math paper, I'd recommend learning a LaTeX or LaTeX, um, which is this latex thing. Um, and so basically this is a, a text writing document language, um, that allows you to format your paper really neatly. And so I learned LaTeX this last summer at RSI because we were required to write our papers in this, um, language. And so, uh, if you're a math paper, this is like a must, I would highly recommend you learn this. Otherwise I don't think it's necessary and honestly it's a little bit slower at times. Um, I found it, I like most of my papers I did in Microsoft Word and that was like significantly easier just like using a template in Microsoft Word or whatnot. And so you want to learn like how you're going to write it. Um, okay. Now point C is again, if you're submitting to a specific journal and they may have a specific format. And so as you can see on the right side, like, okay, background results, conclusions, you may think like, oh, okay, this is like your submission. This is actually just the abstract. So certain journals have these like weird formats where it's like, Hey, your abstract should be split up into background research results and conclusions and things like that. And so it's, it'll save you a lot of time, like to stick to the format that you're trying to submit to beforehand. Um, otherwise if you're like, Hey, I'm not even sure if I'm going to submit yet. Um, I don't know, like I'm, I'm just going to preprint and then try to like copy what or like the format, copy the format of what other papers in your field do. Um, otherwise just do like a simple introduction or background methods, results, and then a discussion and conclusion. All right. Now, step four is, uh, what you've all been waiting for, of course, is publication. And so again, point a preprint or paper, you can submit onto archive, med archive, bio archive. There's also a couple other preprint servers that I didn't even know existed until pretty recently. Um, and so there's, there's a variety of preprint servers. And so just search it on Google, like preprint servers I can submit to or whatever, and you will find like decent resources on how you can do that or the journal, like look for other papers in your field. Where did they get published? Search for like top journals in this area, scroll down the impact factor list, figure out where your fits in, identify the journal you want to submit to. Um, in addition on like preprint servers, like archive, um, sometimes you have to have like an edu email, um, like at mit.edu or whatever. And so like, like not a specific institution, but in general, like some research institution, like a formal one. And so this is why having a mentor can be useful because if they have an affiliation, they can post the preprint for you. Like, of course you'll still be first author or whatever, uh, coauthor place you were, but they can like submit it on behalf of you and there'll be like the corresponding author. Um, and then yeah, that like, that's pretty helpful. And I've seen some high schoolers, like they have a mentor who's able to put it on to archive or bio archive for them. Um, I, in, in more recently I was able to use my official affiliation with a university to preprint like as a student research assistant. So I found that pretty helpful, like if you have that affiliation, but if you don't, then like if you have your mentor, um, ask them on like how you can do it again, preprinting is like free, it gets it out there and then you can consider publication after preprinting. Um, and now if your paper is good quality, you will hopefully be able to find experts who can guide you on how to preprint. Like if you have a, you know, a not so good paper, they might be hesitant to like preprint that even because you know, even preprints have to, you know, still meet, they should be meeting like the graduate level standard because it's just a step before publication, as I mentioned earlier. But at the same time, like, you know, if your paper is not so good, then you should try to make it good before preprinting, um, and before contacting experts who can help you guide that. But at the same time, those experts can provide feedback on your manuscript so you can improve it. And, um, before preprinting, um, the second is to get reviewed. And so usually like you write your paper, you get reviewed with your other coauthors and then you submit it and to a journal and then the journal will peer review it. Right. But I would recommend reviewing it, like basically doing kind of an informal peer review before even submitting it to the journal, because otherwise like there's a high chance you'll just get rejected because you're a high schooler who probably is not like an expert at writing papers yet. And so review it as much as possible before even submitting before preprinting if possible. And point C is that, um, yeah, if you're still unable to preprint or publish, then you can consider a high school journal. Um, my papers in high school, like they have been good enough quality for preprint servers or graduate level journals. Um, and so I've never submitted to a high school journal, but I've heard from like my friends that this is a thing you can do. And so basically like for your papers that aren't at that level, you can submit to like a high school journal or like, let's say you don't have a mentor, you have like, you don't have the funds to like end up getting published or whatever. And your paper is like not at the level for preprint or you don't have a mentor who can submit on the edu thing for the preprint, then you can submit to a high school journal. And so this is like a little bit of the miss info thing that I was touching on at the beginning with other high schoolers on YouTube, because they say like, Oh yeah, just submit straight to like the high school journal. Like why? Because the high school journal is not, you know, a graduate level research paper. And so it's not, I don't even know if these are indexed by Google scholar. Like it's not at the, it's not, um, I wouldn't consider it like a formal research publication. Um, because these, I don't even know how like rigorous their peer review is, right? They might be having other high schoolers like peer reviewing your paper. And so that's a little bit suspicious to me. Um, and I've, I've heard some miss info on that, like stuff that people are talking about on YouTube. I'm not going to dive too much into what that miss info was, but like basically this is an option at the end of the day, like if there's nothing else left, but you still want to get your research out there, then sure. Go for it. Like a high school journal, I think is pretty adequate. And for those of you, if it's like your first paper, you don't have a lot of experience in STEM research and you don't have a lot of experience writing your paper, this is like totally valid. And so, um, yeah, um, and so now watch this full 17 minute guide on how to get the research internship in the first place with resources, templates, like actually it's, it's super useful. It's probably even more helpful than this video was because it gives you like actionable tips and like step-by-step guide. And also please subscribe. Thank you. Bye. I'll see you next time.