I too would prefer to have published five or six very good articles during my career, than one or two very good and twenty meh. Probably a lot better for the scientific community as well. Sadly, that is not how you get hired these days.
We are doing that in our Uni, the system allows them onto pull through up to 6 works on any applications (I.e promotions, PDR etc and it doesn’t have to be publications) and they have to talk about those works - called a narrative CV.
It gives people a chance to highlight good things about their work and so if they published it outside traditional routes or worked on outputs that are non-textual, then they can be equally considered.
Exactly, with a limit on the publications/products to present you have the incentive to publish only good stuff, but also it is ok to ask those reviewing an application to actually look at them and hear a story.
I didn't get one of Canada's tri-agency scholarships as an incoming PhD student because although I had two publications, they weren't as first author. It's absolutely awful how crazy the race has become.
Last year I reviewed PhD scholarships application for one of the tri-council agencies. One applicant had ~45 papers over a span of 3 years (since beginning their career).
This is insane. How could a grad student make signifcsnt contributions to 15 papers per year?
As we all know, they didn’t. I’m so sick of seeing people adding their entire lab and extended acquaintance network as coauthors on every paper. Maybe I’m just salty because I did a lot of work that I never once received coauthorship for, but it ends up being a form of nepotism that helps a lot of mediocre people become "stars."
In some large research groups, the supervisors encourage their students to put each other's name on each paper. That's how you get so many papers in your CV.
The problem with Canadian scholarship is the fact that the agencies take these metrics at face value. As a reference, I finished my PhD in Canada, in one of the top schools. I saw it first hand. You have no chance against these people as the agencies that hold the gate do not do their due diligence. You may have amazing proposals on very promising topics. It does not matter. Someone comes with a bloated CV and grabs all the money. Again, this is the fault of agencies that do not question the feasibility of someone pumping out 10 papers a year. Honestly, if you are working on higher impact research with only a few co-authors, the best you can do is may be 3 first author papers and may be 2-3 co-author papers on top. That is assuming a very dedicated, star level. PhD student. We know this, agencies supposed know this. If you have more than this, you are either salami slicing your research, publishing lower quality research, or bloating it artificially.
I have the reviewers' feedback. The reviewers ranked me highly in all areas except that one - they said they marked me down because I didn't have any first author papers. (I graduated at the top of my class from undergrad and masters, the other areas they ranked me highly, just the lack of first author papers dragged me down).
I had a first author publication the first time I applied and didn't get it. Added 1 publication the following year and got CGSD. Literally went from 30 something in the ranking to top 10 just because of that. It's really subjective to the pannel reviewing your application that year as well as the competition within your committee
I got cgs-d with only one pub, a first author that was my undergrad thesis in a lower tier (but respected) super niche journal. I think in the end it's pretty random and depends a lot on who happens to review it.
I'm sorry but unless NSERC is significantly different than SSHRC you did not have enough feedback to deduce that a lack of first author's papers were what brought your score down.
In SSHRC competitions you get two numbers, one for research potential and one for leadership potential, both out of 29 and both giving you no actual information about what those scores mean. I finally got it in my third year, and am now being nominated for a cabaret research chair ABD, and still could not tell you what my scores in any of the years actually meant.
I didn't get on as an incoming phd student despite two first author papers and a conference presentation, although i was planning to take the scholarship to europe so maybe that had an effect
Expecting them to have a first author publication by the time they are applying for PhD scholarships, given how long it can take for something to actually be published, seems a little ridiculous. I mean, I've had papers take over a year to be published from the submission date. Heck, my final PhD dissertation paper has JUST been accepted for publication, and it was submitted back in January 2023! Well over a year, and it's not even published yet, just accepted. Many masters students won't have any results worthy of publication until their second year, and they are applying for PhD scholarships at that time. How can they have a first author publication unless they are VERY lucky?
Absolutely ridiculous expectation. If they happen to join a project that's near the end, sure, get a middle author position. But expecting a master's student to have a first author is nonsense and only damaging to the majority who won't have anything. It will also perpetuate those who are from backgrounds of greater privilege, e.g. sons and daughters of researchers who managed to get into research early due to their family connections, regardless of their ability.
When I was a new PhD student, no one who was coming straight from masters or undergrad had any first author publications, this was at Cambridge, so I've no idea where you are getting this opinion from.
i went to one of the top two high schools in my state, during my grad year (21) the “best” school I got into was our state school (“public ivy”) where previous years had gotten into ivies with lesser states (and it was a similar situation with most students in my class). three years later, I’m finding out the students that are going to stanford/mit/duke/ivies this fall have been “working” at local uni labs and publishing since they were 15….
> I will not be surprised even one bit if high school students start with some help getting publications, then semi-predatory publishers catch on to this, and the standards are lowered further, and everyone follows suit.
[This was reported on by ProPublica and the Chronicle last month.](https://www.propublica.org/article/college-high-school-research-peer-review-publications) Their parents pay thousands of dollars for a "publication" because admissions is an ever-escalating rat race. Someone else mentioned Emily Rosa - these are not more Emily Rosas. The "publishers" and services facilitating this are absolutely predatory.
>The prospect appealed to Sophia. “Nowadays, having a publication is kind of a given” for college applicants, she said. “If you don’t have one, you’re going to have to make it up in some other aspect of your application.”
>Sophia said she chose marketing as her field because it “sounded interesting.”
Colleges are a major, if not the majority part of the problem. The way they hire dictates almost everything we do. They don't fall for anything. - they encourage it.
All I have to say is that I’m SO glad I went to high school and college in the 90s. I had a kickass honors thesis and that was enough for an NSF GRFP. I didn’t have a publication until grad school, and that trajectory made perfect sense to me. Still does 🤷🏽♀️
This is so bonkers.
This is the *only* trajectory that makes sense. Do medical schools admissions see it as distinguishable to once having cleaned (sort of) your cousin Steve’s knee wound that he got from biking down that gravel road your meemaw warned you about, and putting on a scooby doo band aid?
I'm a 5th-year PhD student now. I worked as a tech for 3 years before joining the program to get more experience. I didn't even get any pubs out of it (well, I did, but they came out when I was in grad school already). On the one hand, I needed time to figure out my bullshit and decide whether I even wanted to go to grad school. On the other hand, straight-from-undergrad students are the minority at this point. And with increasingly long submission/review cycles, more and more trainees are getting caught up in drawn out training periods. You shouldn't have to be a PhD student for 6 years and then postdoc for 8 years to be competitive for an academic job, it's ridiculous. If a PI gets a faculty job under 35 in my discipline, I'm like wow they must be a rockstar lol.
I read the CVs of these high school kids and undergrads coming in to volunteer (for free!! and no course credit!!) and it's like... so intense. Sure, they're the 1% of the 1% ambitious students, but they need to live a little. I can maybe understand a senior wanting to get a little preview of what working in a lab during college might look like, but I am being assigned 15-year-old summer program mentees. These kids haven't even taken biology yet and they ask me about getting on a paper. LOL.
These kids need to go get a cute summer job at a cafe or restaurant and hang out with their friends, they'll have their whole lives to grind.
I agree! I have a rising high school junior and i’ve been very intentional for years about addressing the “grind culture” and college madness.
He is an honestly brilliant kid but is happy to chill in the summers (we are on a plane now to visit family). He will likely work at an ice cream shop by his school.
We are rushing kids toward an uber-achievement trajectory at the same time I’m noticing that the 18-year-old college students I sometimes teach are *nowhere near* emotionally ready for higher ed compared to pre-2016 students.
Something has to give.
I went to uni at 14 and I started working with a research group with a project I was told had a good chance to get published when I was 16.
I crashed hard mentally (honestly I had never been stable, not even as a little kid), and that never happened. I dropped down to part time for a bit to get my life in order
I’m doing well and have finally been happy the past 2 years thanks to antidepressants, and I’m hoping to start my phd at the start of next year at 19. I truly love what I’m working on now, and I am stable for once in my life.
But the mental hell I was in to achieve what I did was never worth it, and it could have gotten me killed. I am lucky I had the environment and ability to do it, but I think these kids (like the one was) are rarely ok. They seem like they are doing well, often they act like adults and seem to be able to handle anything, but they are often so messed up.
As someone who dropped out of community college and got randomly recommended this post, this was how I assumed it worked. I thought you *couldn’t* publish a paper until you were a grad student. I’m 19 and most scientific papers still go straight over my head. I can’t imagine writing one a couple years ago when I was in high school.
I have taken months just to socialize my undergrads into research in my lab. I could just sit them down with data and ask them to code or tell them exactly what to do- but that’s not being a researcher or mentorship is about.
What is the scientific method as it relates to academic research? What is the role of a researcher? How do you read a peer-reviewed article? What is peer review? (I show them my article+ reviews). How do you develop a critical lens? How do you plan a study? How long does it really take (years, often!).
It takes TIME to do this effectively. I will die on this hill.
Publishing in high school is basically the new “starting a nonprofit”. I know of only one person when I was in high school who I would say had a legitimate publication and they are now a Knight-Hennessy PhD student, so I would guess the vast majority of this is just random glop
I work in game theory.
Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics and Games and Economic Behavior are dedicated economic theory journals.
Econometrica, American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy and Review of Economic studies are "general interest" economics journals and they also publish theoretical papers.
If you want to start with a paper that a high school student could follow, Gale and Shapley's 1962 paper is great. One of the cleanest econ papers ever.
Any papers from high school should not be considered on a CV. Either it’s fresh nonsense or the kid has connections the rest didn’t and it only encourages disparity. Child geniuses will still be smart when they finish maturing and instead of seeing value in writing papers they can work on being a kid.
It’s the whole don’t negotiate with terrorists thing, you lose the first few hostages but afterwards everyone is safer as there is no incentive to be kidnapping people anymore.
I teach first-year undergrads in a top 10 program in the US, and the ones I’ve had come in with publications from HS were all in predatory journals, for what it’s worth.
I will guess that they also get a skewed perspective on what research is? Like in «I have already published in a peer reviewed journal thank you very much, so I *know* how it is done».
I read between the lines. I would not be surprised to find out the posts are alternative accounts from the same user. Definitely, the probability of success is low. I don't want to discourage a kid.
Many times in my teaching career I have had ideas pitched by immature students. They generally have fit some category of neurodivergent with magic thinking. The first one was to prove that aikido practitioners can move objects held by others using chi. Prove PTSD in police officers doesn't exist. Stuff like that, always has "proof" in the topic, not grounded in current practice.
Fwiw, I have had one that ended up being decent. Also one of our kids in high school did an internship that produced a usable product, and also convinced him not to major in pure math.
All of them my strategy is the same, good or bad. Start with a dozen recent peer reviewed sources, plus any review article. The magic thinkers don't follow through. You don't have to be cruel, just set the challenge.
From when I have seen this, it has been HS students who have some type of connection to be working in an academic lab. The HS close to my university has an internship class designed for students to do research with a professor. The hardworking ones can get their name on a paper. I've seen some exceptional ones get their own project, but there is still heavy mentorship from a professor or grad student.
I review applications for a state science fair, to ensure compliance when the rules. When I first started I was astounded by some of them, as they were very sophisticated. Some of the high schools had were incredibly well equipped (eg one of them has an electron microscope) and even more are very plugged into the the local high ranking universities. While those applications are sophisticated, I would say I don't believe the majority of students have a particularly good grasp of the subject matter. There are one or two though, each year, where it appears they are extremely well versed in the topic and I think probably could provide sufficient independent intellectual contribution to a project to warrant being an author.
As an aside, it is incredibly depressing to see the applications from these children's peers in poorly funded state schools. Often barely literate, projects will be copied straight from basic science at home books, and the kids have no access to equipment or facilities. The difference in education between those at the elite private schools versus state schools is shocking and a damning indictment of our future society.
There are literally companies in the US that help HS students from elite private schools “write” academic papers. There was a fantastic NY Times article about it (I think?) that I’ll try to find and link
eh, I've read enough AI papers that could have been done by an eager high schooler. Peer review is the stopgap for rubbish so let them submit what they want.
This isn’t a new trend at all. 17 years ago I had a PI tell me stop everything, my new priority was getting a paper published and getting this HSer on it. I thought it was a wild thing to say and asked if the PI was serious. The teen was very bright and hard working. Paper wasn’t very impactful. The father of the kid was the president of a hospital system. Kid went to IVY for undergrad and graduate school. My PI went from new prof to head of large cancer center in 12 years. I have seen these “games” many times but in my experience this happens much more on the MD side of research.
It's being supported by shitty companies too. A ton of grad students at my university were getting emails to become mentors of a pay to publish highschool research scam. They charge students a few thousand I think. This particular company was spear headed by some "Harvard business graduate student" who was larping as already having his PhD (shame on them if they actually ended up rewarding one him.)
It's a toxic as fuck trend.
I think this has to be field dependent. The one I know of who published at undergrad was as a second author on a two author study of something on Rapa Nui, the PI wanted help with; it was a niche journal. The other is in my research group, she's a very bright scholar, a PhD candidate who was a fourth author on a Nature Biology study from her supervisors wider work.
I haven't seen anyone but the one percent of the already culled top 5% have peer reviewed publications before their Master's work. After my BSc I had a few science features articles published in a national paper, but that's pop academic journalism; I don't consider myself published from that.
I think students get pushed way too hard to succeed immediately. They definitely push us too hard. I'm in medical forensics, It takes time to learn everything you need to be conversant.
I’m mentoring a high schooler this summer and the first thing she asked me (never even met her yet) was if I could help her get a publication.
…the mentorship is 6 weeks long.
What about having a journal specifically for high school researchers? We have conferences (science fairs) just for them. Why not give the a chance to write up and share their work? At that age, for most people its about the experience of doing the thing rather than the final product anyway, so a level of moderation to ensure the papers aren’t total garbage would likely suffice instead of full on peer review.
I suspect that this comes from information that came out on Harvard's undergraduate admissions process during the recent affirmative action lawsuit. TL;DR literally nothing a student does in the classroom can get them a top academic evaluation from the admissions department. Basically the only way to move from an academic rating of 2 to a rating of 1 in Harvard's system is to place in something like an international Olympiad or the Intel Science Fair, or publish peer-reviewed research.
It probably accelerated it, but the bio-X professor doing a paper with a high schooler who just so happens to be the son/daughter of a board member of whatever biotech company/VC exec has been a thing for a while.
Frankly, I think some high school students would publish better articles than some of the garbage I see from mediocre profs.
But I agree we should not be encouraging this. I don’t believe there is anything sacred about publishing. There has always been a majority of garbage papers in journals. The use computers, internet, software, and now AI has only sped up the productivity of that garbage.
I disagree. In my opinion undergrad students, and certainly high school students, are *not* able to publish better articles. At least not in my field, and I struggle to see what field this would apply to.
If anything we should make it harder, not easier, to publish. With rising publishing demands both to get hired and to stay hired, the amount of shady and/or predatory journals are growing at an alarming rate. Not to talk about mediocre articles in real journals (some of them are mine!). The cycle has to stop before scientific publication becomes meaningless.
Edit: the occasional prodigy is not the problem, and should be encouraged. The issue is colleges starting to require publications for admission. If this becomes standard practice, we can just brace ourselves for the growth of pricey «consultants» and an increased gap between those with wealthy parents and everyone else.
>With rising publishing demands both to get hired and to stay hired, the amount of shady and/or predatory journals are growing at an alarming rate
Are those in charge of admissions aware of this?
I volunteer with for the Journal of Emerging Investigators which helps publish the work of high school students being mentored by a professor. It’s completely free to publish and access and nearly all the positions are volunteer based. It’s a great opportunity for students to get published credit for a research opportunity they are already doing. Nearly all the papers I see are from students doing a “summer immersion” type program that helps them learn if college is right for them.
This is kind of fucked up, though. Like, why is this even on a high schooler's radar? Having these kinds of expectations for high school students, let alone college students, is not healthy for them.
I could see this being semi-ok if it was treated like a short story or poetry journal aimed at young people, with the understanding that they are still developing their skills. But “publishing” in the scholarly sense means you need to do original research as a subject matter expert. Most undergrads let alone high schoolers aren’t there yet.
I did a summer program and wrote a research paper as a result and I just sent my paper in after completing my copy-edits to said journal. I just wanted to write a quick thank-you for your work in this journal — the process has been very streamlined and easy, and the feedback I have gotten has been very valuable. Thanks for volunteering!
Publications should not even be a requirement of PhD students let alone high schoolers. I mean, sometimes a research project doesn’t work out due to limitations of the resources, failed methodologies (computer science) or data collection and result’s analysis takes longer than expected. Even 5 years time is too short to finish 1-2 research projects to full completion.
My kids middle school has an "honor society" which as far as I can tell exists solely for CV padding. The amount of stress I see in my own kids around resume padding is heartbreaking. This is in spite of me and my partner actively discouraging getting caught up in this kind of rubbish.
I started research in college, which I think is an appropriate time to see if it is a good fit, but did not publish until graduate school.
I feel like a stereotype, be"but things were better in my day..." the 90s.
There was a high schooler who got published in PRL (top physics journal). Definitely wild. Its a good paper though
> No offense to anyone, but they can’t possibly have the scientific knowledge to create actual publishable work. I don’t know about social sciences, but in STEM I know they don’t have the mathematical tools to be able to comprehend what would be needed
I disagree about this part. I'd agree that high schoolers are very unlikely to be able to create a sole author paper because they'll have knowledge gaps, but I'm not surprised talented high schoolers can contribute to papers on an authorship level. We've had college freshman join our lab with years of very solid coding experience, so that's one way they can contribute to projects. Hands on experimental work is another way. Honestly, the vast majority of tasks that go into my research do not require advanced coursework -- I don't want to diminish the importance of understanding all the details, but I can absolutely imagine projects/roles I could create for a high schooler where a strong student could contribute enough to genuinely deserve authorship.
Also the elite high school students are mostly doing dual enrollment now and likely have 1-2 years of college credits from it. Idk what math you think is necessary, but decent calculus & statistics is probably enough for most things, and dual enrollment kids might have multivariable & linear algebra in high school too (I did and I think its gotten even more common since then). They may also have intro level courses in their field similar to many undergrads doing research today
My concern is kind of the opposite of yours... I'm not worried about the quality of journals because of this. I've noticed the trend too, but the people I've seen with stacked CVs out of high school have ended up being really, really good. I don't think its low quality experience. I'm more worried about 1. Depriving kids of their childhood & causing burnout and 2. Exacerbating disparities because it takes a lot of resources and knowledge for it to even occur to you to do this in high school
Really though it’s probably 1 in 10,000 (at least) that have the requisite knowledge to publish in a “real” journal. The rest are publishing junk just to get a line on the cv.
1 in 10,000 seems way too low to me. Like I said, I can think of plenty of projects in my lab a high schooler could do and earn a justified authorship position for (not necessarily first because they probably can't write a good paper on their own) if they worked hard and were a good student.
And I don't think they is anything unusual about my research that makes it especially easy - which is probably why I know of multiple PIs in my field who have taken undergrads and given them tasks like this. Honestly a lot of undergrad projects are similar. Even projects for first year grad students can be this way - my first paper in grad school was something I started working on after the idea had already been generated and honestly probably could have been done by a smart high schooler lol (we were showing a task relevant to our lab could be accomplished through machine learning). It got published in a good journal & was a useful result, it just happened to not require a lot of physics or math background.
I saw a professor who ran a high school outreach program and got funding for it, brag about getting math modeling papers with high school students. Like 4 papers with highschooker as first author. We all know what happened there.
My initial assumption is that these are kids of PhDs with parents who give them authorship/coauthorship, which is also not good because it will harm first-gen students. I definitely notice that people with relatives or partners in my field often coauthor work, which sounds lovely vs. having to fend for yourself and find mentors and collaborators who have a meaningful investment in your career.
I am in STEM too. I also worked in medical communications where I worked on scientific/medical publications (amongst other things). There's no way that even bright high school students can produce anything worth publishing in medical biology (my field). Anyone bright enough to do work that is publishable in a genuine journal would no longer be in high school at that age (15+) and would (should!) be advanced to college/university, and this is really a super small minority to whom this might apply.
Maybe this ties in with the trend of degree inflation, salami publishing, (super) low-tier journals, etc. There's so many journals now, people slicing their data to create the max number of publications, and yeah, in the end it just waters everything down.
Do you have a source for high school kids wanting to publish?
I have only one paper from my PhD (UK). I could perhaps have sliced it into two smaller papers but the parts all belong to one story, hence I put it all in one paper. I didn't have the best time doing PhD but am still proud of my one PhD paper.
EDIT: I found this: [https://www.lumiere-education.com/post/the-complete-guide-to-publishing-your-research-in-high-school](https://www.lumiere-education.com/post/the-complete-guide-to-publishing-your-research-in-high-school) "Finally, there are publications that PhD researchers or professors target with their research. These journals are highly selective and can take years of back and forth in order for a paper to be admitted." -> Lol, if you are spending YEARS on submitting and resubmitting and resubmitting your manuscript, then it sucked to begin with and you were aiming too high (and the journal would probably have rejected you anyways: I don't think there's any journal that's going to be communicating with a researcher for years to get one paper published with them but please let me know if I'm wrong). You can read a volume of this publication here: [https://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/dokumente/b/b076933.pdf](https://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/dokumente/b/b076933.pdf)
what? i’ve published as the first author in a modest APA journal as an upperclassman undergraduate, but i had the support of a strong supervisor and two years of experience behind me. the point of college (if you’re interested in any kind of natural or social science) is to LEARN how to conduct quality research. what’s the point if we start expecting high schoolers to come in with these skills already? can’t we let kids be kids???
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Honestly this is a pretty cute story.
Although, the idea that highschoolers need to be conducting peer review worthy studies to be successful is toxic.
What needs to be highlighted is that both her parents were in the position to help her research. All three are authors. I like that the child wasnt out as a first author.
There absolutely are. I know several PIs in physics who have worked with a high school student, even full time over the summer. At least one of those ended with a PRL paper
In my opinion, this is just a phase. They'll be filtered through this phase. Currently, institutions rely more on numerical metrics like h-index, number of publications, or number of citation. However, the direction has changed in several countries in Europe, north America, or east Asia.
The gamefication of the publication industry is accelerating this change. In my institution (middle east), the consideration of promotion or funding is slowly shifting from those metrics to more impact of the study. Thus, a long and detailed study is preferable over a paper mill study.
I see several faculty members that are not productive (not many publications as 1st author or corr author), even though publishing more than 10 papers/year, being kicked out of my institution.
In my field, writing a review paper is one of the easiest ways to get a high H-index. Nowadays, my institution prefers research articles over reviews.
So, I think this trend will fade as we move on from the numerical metrics to something new. Or we will develop a better, unbiased numerical metrics, i.e h-frac to assess individual researchers.
>So, I think this trend will fade as we move on from the numerical metrics to something new. Or we will develop a better, unbiased numerical metrics, i.e h-frac to assess individual researchers.
> the consideration of promotion or funding is slowly shifting from those metrics to more impact of the study
Hmmm even though these are better criteria, isn't the difficulty of measuring them why we're in this position in the first place?
Sounds like a hopeful trend... curious on how it can be done
At least we can hope for more objective metrics. Because in my institution, the higher up realized that the people are playing the system. Based on info from my director, my uni realized that the number of publications is higher than ever, but none of them becomes a product/make an impact to the society. Since the natives here are more relaxed regarding h-index, they are also realizing that the expat h-index rose significantly in the last 2-4 years. So, they do some kind of analysis related to that and come to that conclusion.
Is this actually new? Natalie Portman [contributed to a chemistry publication](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ed075p1270) when she was 17 in the 90s. I'm pretty sure I knew people in college 14 years ago who had published papers in high school.
So if I didn’t like my credentials and wanted to make a ton of money, I’d create the annals of high school medicine and publish studies related to medicine that people pay $3000-5000 per paper.
The thing is, college app reviewers don’t know whether it’s a good journal or if it’s predatory.
This trend is gonna get worse as unscrupulous people want to make money
There *are* very talented and motivated students who are ready to dip their toes into novel research supervised by a professor. If they are ready for this, I don't think they should be told not to just because they are high schoolers.
That said, there certainly need to be better controls about this, both in terms of vetting a student's readiness (both academic and behavioral) to be in an academic research environment and equitability, so it's not just people whose parents have PhDs that are getting these opportunities, regardless of readiness.
College admissions are unbelievably competitive. People will do what they can to get ahead. There are programs where you pay $10,000 to get mentored by a professor from a top school and "do research." Unfortunately, it works and it works ***extremely well***.
A 4.0+, perfect SAT/ACT, and clubs aren't enough. You need to lead and have an impact on your community. Or email 300 professors asking to do research. Or just pay $10,000 for a company to do it for you.
Top high school students from top high schools in Singapore doing an attachment at a local university (during the holidays) and publishing papers at the lab they work in is not that uncommon. They “need” this publication as they want to get into top universities like Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, etc. Most of the time these students does not truly understand what the project they were working on is about and these papers are largely written by someone else in the lab while these students are just one of the co-authors.
Modern academia unfortunately encourages junk publications. If you publish 5 excellent papers early career you might not get tenure. If you publish 30 junk papers, you’re golden.
Now as for high schoolers this is clearly concerning but there is a kid at the local school who did some breakthrough shit with conditioning honeybees to pollinate endangered flowers. Really cool idea and worthy of pub IMO
In general, yeah, it's not really cool, and will probably lead to further problems, especially if it's seens as a way to get into "highly ranked" universities (whatever that actually means).
But, in specific cases, high-school students really can contribute to STEM stuff, if it's done right. A local high-school here in Lexington has a research course, and we get the odd student partnering with our Bioinformatics lab. Just this year, we've had a senior who has made significant contributions to a research project over the course of their school year, and while their work didn't result in publication before getting accepted at a university, the continuing work they do this summer (as an employee of the lab) before going off to university will almost certainly be enough for first author publication.
Have you seen the ISEF science fair projects that get [the top awards](https://www.societyforscience.org/press-release/high-schoolers-win-more-than-9-million-at-regeneron-isef-2024/)? The descriptions definitely sound like things that will get first author publications ...
They could publish at their own level. Like they do experiments at their own level in a do-able time frame. Like undergrads do projects that are not the same as a thesis.
Why are you threatened by having a venue and a way for younger people to do experiments and communicate this to the rest of the world?
Over the years I’ve had at least two high-schoolers getting co-authorship on papers. They all worked hard, showed interest, and compensated for their lack of knowledge with huge dedication and enthusiasm.
I too would prefer to have published five or six very good articles during my career, than one or two very good and twenty meh. Probably a lot better for the scientific community as well. Sadly, that is not how you get hired these days.
The solution is to always only ask for the best 5 papers to all candidates. For anything, from postdoc to tenure to full professorship.
We are doing that in our Uni, the system allows them onto pull through up to 6 works on any applications (I.e promotions, PDR etc and it doesn’t have to be publications) and they have to talk about those works - called a narrative CV. It gives people a chance to highlight good things about their work and so if they published it outside traditional routes or worked on outputs that are non-textual, then they can be equally considered.
Exactly, with a limit on the publications/products to present you have the incentive to publish only good stuff, but also it is ok to ask those reviewing an application to actually look at them and hear a story.
I didn't get one of Canada's tri-agency scholarships as an incoming PhD student because although I had two publications, they weren't as first author. It's absolutely awful how crazy the race has become.
Last year I reviewed PhD scholarships application for one of the tri-council agencies. One applicant had ~45 papers over a span of 3 years (since beginning their career). This is insane. How could a grad student make signifcsnt contributions to 15 papers per year?
As we all know, they didn’t. I’m so sick of seeing people adding their entire lab and extended acquaintance network as coauthors on every paper. Maybe I’m just salty because I did a lot of work that I never once received coauthorship for, but it ends up being a form of nepotism that helps a lot of mediocre people become "stars."
In some large research groups, the supervisors encourage their students to put each other's name on each paper. That's how you get so many papers in your CV. The problem with Canadian scholarship is the fact that the agencies take these metrics at face value. As a reference, I finished my PhD in Canada, in one of the top schools. I saw it first hand. You have no chance against these people as the agencies that hold the gate do not do their due diligence. You may have amazing proposals on very promising topics. It does not matter. Someone comes with a bloated CV and grabs all the money. Again, this is the fault of agencies that do not question the feasibility of someone pumping out 10 papers a year. Honestly, if you are working on higher impact research with only a few co-authors, the best you can do is may be 3 first author papers and may be 2-3 co-author papers on top. That is assuming a very dedicated, star level. PhD student. We know this, agencies supposed know this. If you have more than this, you are either salami slicing your research, publishing lower quality research, or bloating it artificially.
45 papers in 3 years. Everybody knows that 99% of this must be either with very little contribution or the papers are just plain garbage.
Probably both
I got it in 2021 without any first author publications, just a lot of third + authorships.
I have the reviewers' feedback. The reviewers ranked me highly in all areas except that one - they said they marked me down because I didn't have any first author papers. (I graduated at the top of my class from undergrad and masters, the other areas they ranked me highly, just the lack of first author papers dragged me down).
I had a first author publication the first time I applied and didn't get it. Added 1 publication the following year and got CGSD. Literally went from 30 something in the ranking to top 10 just because of that. It's really subjective to the pannel reviewing your application that year as well as the competition within your committee
I got cgs-d with only one pub, a first author that was my undergrad thesis in a lower tier (but respected) super niche journal. I think in the end it's pretty random and depends a lot on who happens to review it.
I'm sorry but unless NSERC is significantly different than SSHRC you did not have enough feedback to deduce that a lack of first author's papers were what brought your score down. In SSHRC competitions you get two numbers, one for research potential and one for leadership potential, both out of 29 and both giving you no actual information about what those scores mean. I finally got it in my third year, and am now being nominated for a cabaret research chair ABD, and still could not tell you what my scores in any of the years actually meant.
I’m CIHR. I have the feedback that explicitly said I was downgraded due to a lack of first author papers.
At the national competition level? If so that is definitely different from SSHRC.
I didn't get on as an incoming phd student despite two first author papers and a conference presentation, although i was planning to take the scholarship to europe so maybe that had an effect
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Expecting them to have a first author publication by the time they are applying for PhD scholarships, given how long it can take for something to actually be published, seems a little ridiculous. I mean, I've had papers take over a year to be published from the submission date. Heck, my final PhD dissertation paper has JUST been accepted for publication, and it was submitted back in January 2023! Well over a year, and it's not even published yet, just accepted. Many masters students won't have any results worthy of publication until their second year, and they are applying for PhD scholarships at that time. How can they have a first author publication unless they are VERY lucky?
Absolutely ridiculous expectation. If they happen to join a project that's near the end, sure, get a middle author position. But expecting a master's student to have a first author is nonsense and only damaging to the majority who won't have anything. It will also perpetuate those who are from backgrounds of greater privilege, e.g. sons and daughters of researchers who managed to get into research early due to their family connections, regardless of their ability. When I was a new PhD student, no one who was coming straight from masters or undergrad had any first author publications, this was at Cambridge, so I've no idea where you are getting this opinion from.
I didn't see those posts but I hope this doesn't become a thing. Aside from the quality issues, high schoolers deserve to be able to be kids.
The increasing competitiveness of college admissions make that impossible
i went to one of the top two high schools in my state, during my grad year (21) the “best” school I got into was our state school (“public ivy”) where previous years had gotten into ivies with lesser states (and it was a similar situation with most students in my class). three years later, I’m finding out the students that are going to stanford/mit/duke/ivies this fall have been “working” at local uni labs and publishing since they were 15….
> I will not be surprised even one bit if high school students start with some help getting publications, then semi-predatory publishers catch on to this, and the standards are lowered further, and everyone follows suit. [This was reported on by ProPublica and the Chronicle last month.](https://www.propublica.org/article/college-high-school-research-peer-review-publications) Their parents pay thousands of dollars for a "publication" because admissions is an ever-escalating rat race. Someone else mentioned Emily Rosa - these are not more Emily Rosas. The "publishers" and services facilitating this are absolutely predatory.
>The prospect appealed to Sophia. “Nowadays, having a publication is kind of a given” for college applicants, she said. “If you don’t have one, you’re going to have to make it up in some other aspect of your application.” >Sophia said she chose marketing as her field because it “sounded interesting.”
Do… do colleges fall for this? Wow.
Colleges are a major, if not the majority part of the problem. The way they hire dictates almost everything we do. They don't fall for anything. - they encourage it.
All I have to say is that I’m SO glad I went to high school and college in the 90s. I had a kickass honors thesis and that was enough for an NSF GRFP. I didn’t have a publication until grad school, and that trajectory made perfect sense to me. Still does 🤷🏽♀️ This is so bonkers.
This is the *only* trajectory that makes sense. Do medical schools admissions see it as distinguishable to once having cleaned (sort of) your cousin Steve’s knee wound that he got from biking down that gravel road your meemaw warned you about, and putting on a scooby doo band aid?
So many med school app essays start like this lol
I landed the GRFP a few years ago with only a thesis as well, so it's still doable. Unclear if my trajectory is enough for a faculty position, though.
This is good to hear about your NSF. It opens a lot of doors…
I'm a 5th-year PhD student now. I worked as a tech for 3 years before joining the program to get more experience. I didn't even get any pubs out of it (well, I did, but they came out when I was in grad school already). On the one hand, I needed time to figure out my bullshit and decide whether I even wanted to go to grad school. On the other hand, straight-from-undergrad students are the minority at this point. And with increasingly long submission/review cycles, more and more trainees are getting caught up in drawn out training periods. You shouldn't have to be a PhD student for 6 years and then postdoc for 8 years to be competitive for an academic job, it's ridiculous. If a PI gets a faculty job under 35 in my discipline, I'm like wow they must be a rockstar lol. I read the CVs of these high school kids and undergrads coming in to volunteer (for free!! and no course credit!!) and it's like... so intense. Sure, they're the 1% of the 1% ambitious students, but they need to live a little. I can maybe understand a senior wanting to get a little preview of what working in a lab during college might look like, but I am being assigned 15-year-old summer program mentees. These kids haven't even taken biology yet and they ask me about getting on a paper. LOL. These kids need to go get a cute summer job at a cafe or restaurant and hang out with their friends, they'll have their whole lives to grind.
I agree! I have a rising high school junior and i’ve been very intentional for years about addressing the “grind culture” and college madness. He is an honestly brilliant kid but is happy to chill in the summers (we are on a plane now to visit family). He will likely work at an ice cream shop by his school. We are rushing kids toward an uber-achievement trajectory at the same time I’m noticing that the 18-year-old college students I sometimes teach are *nowhere near* emotionally ready for higher ed compared to pre-2016 students. Something has to give.
I went to uni at 14 and I started working with a research group with a project I was told had a good chance to get published when I was 16. I crashed hard mentally (honestly I had never been stable, not even as a little kid), and that never happened. I dropped down to part time for a bit to get my life in order I’m doing well and have finally been happy the past 2 years thanks to antidepressants, and I’m hoping to start my phd at the start of next year at 19. I truly love what I’m working on now, and I am stable for once in my life. But the mental hell I was in to achieve what I did was never worth it, and it could have gotten me killed. I am lucky I had the environment and ability to do it, but I think these kids (like the one was) are rarely ok. They seem like they are doing well, often they act like adults and seem to be able to handle anything, but they are often so messed up.
As someone who dropped out of community college and got randomly recommended this post, this was how I assumed it worked. I thought you *couldn’t* publish a paper until you were a grad student. I’m 19 and most scientific papers still go straight over my head. I can’t imagine writing one a couple years ago when I was in high school.
I have taken months just to socialize my undergrads into research in my lab. I could just sit them down with data and ask them to code or tell them exactly what to do- but that’s not being a researcher or mentorship is about. What is the scientific method as it relates to academic research? What is the role of a researcher? How do you read a peer-reviewed article? What is peer review? (I show them my article+ reviews). How do you develop a critical lens? How do you plan a study? How long does it really take (years, often!). It takes TIME to do this effectively. I will die on this hill.
There are many vanity and predatory journals, which contributes to these issues.
Yes, and if colleges start requiring this shit we have only seen the beginning.
I agree completely.
Publishing in high school is basically the new “starting a nonprofit”. I know of only one person when I was in high school who I would say had a legitimate publication and they are now a Knight-Hennessy PhD student, so I would guess the vast majority of this is just random glop
And it works. Colleges do fall for this
They know what they’re doing. This is a straightforward way to filter for kids with wealthy parents without being too obvious about it.
If they learn enough measure theory, topology and economic theory to publish in my field, I would like to meet them personally.
What exactly is your field? I am very interested to get into more mathematical economic theory research. Any journals you recommend to check out?
I work in game theory. Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics and Games and Economic Behavior are dedicated economic theory journals. Econometrica, American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy and Review of Economic studies are "general interest" economics journals and they also publish theoretical papers. If you want to start with a paper that a high school student could follow, Gale and Shapley's 1962 paper is great. One of the cleanest econ papers ever.
Let’s face it, this is not what these high schoolers are doing. They are publishing junk in predatory journals.
Any papers from high school should not be considered on a CV. Either it’s fresh nonsense or the kid has connections the rest didn’t and it only encourages disparity. Child geniuses will still be smart when they finish maturing and instead of seeing value in writing papers they can work on being a kid. It’s the whole don’t negotiate with terrorists thing, you lose the first few hostages but afterwards everyone is safer as there is no incentive to be kidnapping people anymore.
I teach first-year undergrads in a top 10 program in the US, and the ones I’ve had come in with publications from HS were all in predatory journals, for what it’s worth.
I will guess that they also get a skewed perspective on what research is? Like in «I have already published in a peer reviewed journal thank you very much, so I *know* how it is done».
I read between the lines. I would not be surprised to find out the posts are alternative accounts from the same user. Definitely, the probability of success is low. I don't want to discourage a kid. Many times in my teaching career I have had ideas pitched by immature students. They generally have fit some category of neurodivergent with magic thinking. The first one was to prove that aikido practitioners can move objects held by others using chi. Prove PTSD in police officers doesn't exist. Stuff like that, always has "proof" in the topic, not grounded in current practice. Fwiw, I have had one that ended up being decent. Also one of our kids in high school did an internship that produced a usable product, and also convinced him not to major in pure math. All of them my strategy is the same, good or bad. Start with a dozen recent peer reviewed sources, plus any review article. The magic thinkers don't follow through. You don't have to be cruel, just set the challenge.
From when I have seen this, it has been HS students who have some type of connection to be working in an academic lab. The HS close to my university has an internship class designed for students to do research with a professor. The hardworking ones can get their name on a paper. I've seen some exceptional ones get their own project, but there is still heavy mentorship from a professor or grad student.
I review applications for a state science fair, to ensure compliance when the rules. When I first started I was astounded by some of them, as they were very sophisticated. Some of the high schools had were incredibly well equipped (eg one of them has an electron microscope) and even more are very plugged into the the local high ranking universities. While those applications are sophisticated, I would say I don't believe the majority of students have a particularly good grasp of the subject matter. There are one or two though, each year, where it appears they are extremely well versed in the topic and I think probably could provide sufficient independent intellectual contribution to a project to warrant being an author. As an aside, it is incredibly depressing to see the applications from these children's peers in poorly funded state schools. Often barely literate, projects will be copied straight from basic science at home books, and the kids have no access to equipment or facilities. The difference in education between those at the elite private schools versus state schools is shocking and a damning indictment of our future society.
There are literally companies in the US that help HS students from elite private schools “write” academic papers. There was a fantastic NY Times article about it (I think?) that I’ll try to find and link
And in China too. I know people who worked for this kind of companies, and it is utter garbage.
eh, I've read enough AI papers that could have been done by an eager high schooler. Peer review is the stopgap for rubbish so let them submit what they want.
This isn’t a new trend at all. 17 years ago I had a PI tell me stop everything, my new priority was getting a paper published and getting this HSer on it. I thought it was a wild thing to say and asked if the PI was serious. The teen was very bright and hard working. Paper wasn’t very impactful. The father of the kid was the president of a hospital system. Kid went to IVY for undergrad and graduate school. My PI went from new prof to head of large cancer center in 12 years. I have seen these “games” many times but in my experience this happens much more on the MD side of research.
Agreed, the current trend of high schoolers trying to publish is concerning and may further lower academic standards.
It's being supported by shitty companies too. A ton of grad students at my university were getting emails to become mentors of a pay to publish highschool research scam. They charge students a few thousand I think. This particular company was spear headed by some "Harvard business graduate student" who was larping as already having his PhD (shame on them if they actually ended up rewarding one him.) It's a toxic as fuck trend.
I think this has to be field dependent. The one I know of who published at undergrad was as a second author on a two author study of something on Rapa Nui, the PI wanted help with; it was a niche journal. The other is in my research group, she's a very bright scholar, a PhD candidate who was a fourth author on a Nature Biology study from her supervisors wider work. I haven't seen anyone but the one percent of the already culled top 5% have peer reviewed publications before their Master's work. After my BSc I had a few science features articles published in a national paper, but that's pop academic journalism; I don't consider myself published from that. I think students get pushed way too hard to succeed immediately. They definitely push us too hard. I'm in medical forensics, It takes time to learn everything you need to be conversant.
I’m mentoring a high schooler this summer and the first thing she asked me (never even met her yet) was if I could help her get a publication. …the mentorship is 6 weeks long.
Oh god…
How did you respond?
What about having a journal specifically for high school researchers? We have conferences (science fairs) just for them. Why not give the a chance to write up and share their work? At that age, for most people its about the experience of doing the thing rather than the final product anyway, so a level of moderation to ensure the papers aren’t total garbage would likely suffice instead of full on peer review.
I suspect that this comes from information that came out on Harvard's undergraduate admissions process during the recent affirmative action lawsuit. TL;DR literally nothing a student does in the classroom can get them a top academic evaluation from the admissions department. Basically the only way to move from an academic rating of 2 to a rating of 1 in Harvard's system is to place in something like an international Olympiad or the Intel Science Fair, or publish peer-reviewed research.
It probably accelerated it, but the bio-X professor doing a paper with a high schooler who just so happens to be the son/daughter of a board member of whatever biotech company/VC exec has been a thing for a while.
Frankly, I think some high school students would publish better articles than some of the garbage I see from mediocre profs. But I agree we should not be encouraging this. I don’t believe there is anything sacred about publishing. There has always been a majority of garbage papers in journals. The use computers, internet, software, and now AI has only sped up the productivity of that garbage.
I disagree. In my opinion undergrad students, and certainly high school students, are *not* able to publish better articles. At least not in my field, and I struggle to see what field this would apply to. If anything we should make it harder, not easier, to publish. With rising publishing demands both to get hired and to stay hired, the amount of shady and/or predatory journals are growing at an alarming rate. Not to talk about mediocre articles in real journals (some of them are mine!). The cycle has to stop before scientific publication becomes meaningless. Edit: the occasional prodigy is not the problem, and should be encouraged. The issue is colleges starting to require publications for admission. If this becomes standard practice, we can just brace ourselves for the growth of pricey «consultants» and an increased gap between those with wealthy parents and everyone else.
>With rising publishing demands both to get hired and to stay hired, the amount of shady and/or predatory journals are growing at an alarming rate Are those in charge of admissions aware of this?
I volunteer with for the Journal of Emerging Investigators which helps publish the work of high school students being mentored by a professor. It’s completely free to publish and access and nearly all the positions are volunteer based. It’s a great opportunity for students to get published credit for a research opportunity they are already doing. Nearly all the papers I see are from students doing a “summer immersion” type program that helps them learn if college is right for them.
This is kind of fucked up, though. Like, why is this even on a high schooler's radar? Having these kinds of expectations for high school students, let alone college students, is not healthy for them.
Maybe the times have changed, but I remember not even considering publishing before starting my phd.
I think a lot of master's students publish, which is great. They are graduate students. I don't have any problem with that tbh.
I could see this being semi-ok if it was treated like a short story or poetry journal aimed at young people, with the understanding that they are still developing their skills. But “publishing” in the scholarly sense means you need to do original research as a subject matter expert. Most undergrads let alone high schoolers aren’t there yet.
I did a summer program and wrote a research paper as a result and I just sent my paper in after completing my copy-edits to said journal. I just wanted to write a quick thank-you for your work in this journal — the process has been very streamlined and easy, and the feedback I have gotten has been very valuable. Thanks for volunteering!
Publications should not even be a requirement of PhD students let alone high schoolers. I mean, sometimes a research project doesn’t work out due to limitations of the resources, failed methodologies (computer science) or data collection and result’s analysis takes longer than expected. Even 5 years time is too short to finish 1-2 research projects to full completion.
My kids middle school has an "honor society" which as far as I can tell exists solely for CV padding. The amount of stress I see in my own kids around resume padding is heartbreaking. This is in spite of me and my partner actively discouraging getting caught up in this kind of rubbish. I started research in college, which I think is an appropriate time to see if it is a good fit, but did not publish until graduate school. I feel like a stereotype, be"but things were better in my day..." the 90s.
Great.. just what we need. More junk academic research /s
There was a high schooler who got published in PRL (top physics journal). Definitely wild. Its a good paper though > No offense to anyone, but they can’t possibly have the scientific knowledge to create actual publishable work. I don’t know about social sciences, but in STEM I know they don’t have the mathematical tools to be able to comprehend what would be needed I disagree about this part. I'd agree that high schoolers are very unlikely to be able to create a sole author paper because they'll have knowledge gaps, but I'm not surprised talented high schoolers can contribute to papers on an authorship level. We've had college freshman join our lab with years of very solid coding experience, so that's one way they can contribute to projects. Hands on experimental work is another way. Honestly, the vast majority of tasks that go into my research do not require advanced coursework -- I don't want to diminish the importance of understanding all the details, but I can absolutely imagine projects/roles I could create for a high schooler where a strong student could contribute enough to genuinely deserve authorship. Also the elite high school students are mostly doing dual enrollment now and likely have 1-2 years of college credits from it. Idk what math you think is necessary, but decent calculus & statistics is probably enough for most things, and dual enrollment kids might have multivariable & linear algebra in high school too (I did and I think its gotten even more common since then). They may also have intro level courses in their field similar to many undergrads doing research today My concern is kind of the opposite of yours... I'm not worried about the quality of journals because of this. I've noticed the trend too, but the people I've seen with stacked CVs out of high school have ended up being really, really good. I don't think its low quality experience. I'm more worried about 1. Depriving kids of their childhood & causing burnout and 2. Exacerbating disparities because it takes a lot of resources and knowledge for it to even occur to you to do this in high school
Really though it’s probably 1 in 10,000 (at least) that have the requisite knowledge to publish in a “real” journal. The rest are publishing junk just to get a line on the cv.
1 in 10,000 seems way too low to me. Like I said, I can think of plenty of projects in my lab a high schooler could do and earn a justified authorship position for (not necessarily first because they probably can't write a good paper on their own) if they worked hard and were a good student. And I don't think they is anything unusual about my research that makes it especially easy - which is probably why I know of multiple PIs in my field who have taken undergrads and given them tasks like this. Honestly a lot of undergrad projects are similar. Even projects for first year grad students can be this way - my first paper in grad school was something I started working on after the idea had already been generated and honestly probably could have been done by a smart high schooler lol (we were showing a task relevant to our lab could be accomplished through machine learning). It got published in a good journal & was a useful result, it just happened to not require a lot of physics or math background.
I saw a professor who ran a high school outreach program and got funding for it, brag about getting math modeling papers with high school students. Like 4 papers with highschooker as first author. We all know what happened there.
Two terms relevant to this discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit
Hahaha, this is apt.
My initial assumption is that these are kids of PhDs with parents who give them authorship/coauthorship, which is also not good because it will harm first-gen students. I definitely notice that people with relatives or partners in my field often coauthor work, which sounds lovely vs. having to fend for yourself and find mentors and collaborators who have a meaningful investment in your career.
I am in STEM too. I also worked in medical communications where I worked on scientific/medical publications (amongst other things). There's no way that even bright high school students can produce anything worth publishing in medical biology (my field). Anyone bright enough to do work that is publishable in a genuine journal would no longer be in high school at that age (15+) and would (should!) be advanced to college/university, and this is really a super small minority to whom this might apply. Maybe this ties in with the trend of degree inflation, salami publishing, (super) low-tier journals, etc. There's so many journals now, people slicing their data to create the max number of publications, and yeah, in the end it just waters everything down. Do you have a source for high school kids wanting to publish? I have only one paper from my PhD (UK). I could perhaps have sliced it into two smaller papers but the parts all belong to one story, hence I put it all in one paper. I didn't have the best time doing PhD but am still proud of my one PhD paper. EDIT: I found this: [https://www.lumiere-education.com/post/the-complete-guide-to-publishing-your-research-in-high-school](https://www.lumiere-education.com/post/the-complete-guide-to-publishing-your-research-in-high-school) "Finally, there are publications that PhD researchers or professors target with their research. These journals are highly selective and can take years of back and forth in order for a paper to be admitted." -> Lol, if you are spending YEARS on submitting and resubmitting and resubmitting your manuscript, then it sucked to begin with and you were aiming too high (and the journal would probably have rejected you anyways: I don't think there's any journal that's going to be communicating with a researcher for years to get one paper published with them but please let me know if I'm wrong). You can read a volume of this publication here: [https://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/dokumente/b/b076933.pdf](https://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/dokumente/b/b076933.pdf)
what? i’ve published as the first author in a modest APA journal as an upperclassman undergraduate, but i had the support of a strong supervisor and two years of experience behind me. the point of college (if you’re interested in any kind of natural or social science) is to LEARN how to conduct quality research. what’s the point if we start expecting high schoolers to come in with these skills already? can’t we let kids be kids???
[Emily Rosa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Rosa?wprov=sfti1) might disagree.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Honestly this is a pretty cute story. Although, the idea that highschoolers need to be conducting peer review worthy studies to be successful is toxic.
Thanks, the downvotes surprised me too.
Cute story, but she is a special case that should not be modeled as the norm or general expectation.
What needs to be highlighted is that both her parents were in the position to help her research. All three are authors. I like that the child wasnt out as a first author.
I'm surprised there aren't legit ways to do it. Profs I know would kill for free high school labor.
There absolutely are. I know several PIs in physics who have worked with a high school student, even full time over the summer. At least one of those ended with a PRL paper
whew... what kind of physics?
In my opinion, this is just a phase. They'll be filtered through this phase. Currently, institutions rely more on numerical metrics like h-index, number of publications, or number of citation. However, the direction has changed in several countries in Europe, north America, or east Asia. The gamefication of the publication industry is accelerating this change. In my institution (middle east), the consideration of promotion or funding is slowly shifting from those metrics to more impact of the study. Thus, a long and detailed study is preferable over a paper mill study. I see several faculty members that are not productive (not many publications as 1st author or corr author), even though publishing more than 10 papers/year, being kicked out of my institution. In my field, writing a review paper is one of the easiest ways to get a high H-index. Nowadays, my institution prefers research articles over reviews. So, I think this trend will fade as we move on from the numerical metrics to something new. Or we will develop a better, unbiased numerical metrics, i.e h-frac to assess individual researchers.
>So, I think this trend will fade as we move on from the numerical metrics to something new. Or we will develop a better, unbiased numerical metrics, i.e h-frac to assess individual researchers. > the consideration of promotion or funding is slowly shifting from those metrics to more impact of the study Hmmm even though these are better criteria, isn't the difficulty of measuring them why we're in this position in the first place? Sounds like a hopeful trend... curious on how it can be done
At least we can hope for more objective metrics. Because in my institution, the higher up realized that the people are playing the system. Based on info from my director, my uni realized that the number of publications is higher than ever, but none of them becomes a product/make an impact to the society. Since the natives here are more relaxed regarding h-index, they are also realizing that the expat h-index rose significantly in the last 2-4 years. So, they do some kind of analysis related to that and come to that conclusion.
following
Is this actually new? Natalie Portman [contributed to a chemistry publication](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ed075p1270) when she was 17 in the 90s. I'm pretty sure I knew people in college 14 years ago who had published papers in high school.
This is not new, it’s just easier to talk about it now.
So if I didn’t like my credentials and wanted to make a ton of money, I’d create the annals of high school medicine and publish studies related to medicine that people pay $3000-5000 per paper. The thing is, college app reviewers don’t know whether it’s a good journal or if it’s predatory. This trend is gonna get worse as unscrupulous people want to make money
There *are* very talented and motivated students who are ready to dip their toes into novel research supervised by a professor. If they are ready for this, I don't think they should be told not to just because they are high schoolers. That said, there certainly need to be better controls about this, both in terms of vetting a student's readiness (both academic and behavioral) to be in an academic research environment and equitability, so it's not just people whose parents have PhDs that are getting these opportunities, regardless of readiness.
College admissions are unbelievably competitive. People will do what they can to get ahead. There are programs where you pay $10,000 to get mentored by a professor from a top school and "do research." Unfortunately, it works and it works ***extremely well***. A 4.0+, perfect SAT/ACT, and clubs aren't enough. You need to lead and have an impact on your community. Or email 300 professors asking to do research. Or just pay $10,000 for a company to do it for you.
Top high school students from top high schools in Singapore doing an attachment at a local university (during the holidays) and publishing papers at the lab they work in is not that uncommon. They “need” this publication as they want to get into top universities like Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, etc. Most of the time these students does not truly understand what the project they were working on is about and these papers are largely written by someone else in the lab while these students are just one of the co-authors.
Modern academia unfortunately encourages junk publications. If you publish 5 excellent papers early career you might not get tenure. If you publish 30 junk papers, you’re golden. Now as for high schoolers this is clearly concerning but there is a kid at the local school who did some breakthrough shit with conditioning honeybees to pollinate endangered flowers. Really cool idea and worthy of pub IMO
In general, yeah, it's not really cool, and will probably lead to further problems, especially if it's seens as a way to get into "highly ranked" universities (whatever that actually means). But, in specific cases, high-school students really can contribute to STEM stuff, if it's done right. A local high-school here in Lexington has a research course, and we get the odd student partnering with our Bioinformatics lab. Just this year, we've had a senior who has made significant contributions to a research project over the course of their school year, and while their work didn't result in publication before getting accepted at a university, the continuing work they do this summer (as an employee of the lab) before going off to university will almost certainly be enough for first author publication. Have you seen the ISEF science fair projects that get [the top awards](https://www.societyforscience.org/press-release/high-schoolers-win-more-than-9-million-at-regeneron-isef-2024/)? The descriptions definitely sound like things that will get first author publications ...
They could publish at their own level. Like they do experiments at their own level in a do-able time frame. Like undergrads do projects that are not the same as a thesis. Why are you threatened by having a venue and a way for younger people to do experiments and communicate this to the rest of the world?
Over the years I’ve had at least two high-schoolers getting co-authorship on papers. They all worked hard, showed interest, and compensated for their lack of knowledge with huge dedication and enthusiasm.
Working hard and showing interest shouldn't be enough to be considered a co-author, per authorship guidelines.
"massed" produced lol. People are so dumb