Guidelines
Read this before you write. Most papers that get turned away are turned away for reasons that were avoidable at the outline stage.
School students, roughly grades 6 to 12. You need a referring adult: a school, a teacher, a parent or a tuition mentor. That adult is our point of contact for consent and for scheduling, and they do not need any research background themselves.
You do not need prior research experience, a laboratory, or a topic worked out in advance. A question you are genuinely curious about is enough to start.
We publish three. If you are unsure, say so in your enquiry and a mentor will help you pick.
1,500 to 2,500 words
A student proposes an idea of their own and argues it from evidence.
The hardest and the most rewarding of the three. The student starts from a question nobody handed them, works out what would count as an answer, and builds the case. Expect several rounds of narrowing before the question is small enough to actually answer.
2,000 to 3,000 words
A student reads widely on one question and reports what the field currently knows.
The best first paper for most students. It teaches the skills everything else depends on: finding sources, judging which to trust, noticing where researchers disagree, and summarising without flattening the disagreement.
800 to 1,500 words
A student takes a position on something contested and defends it.
Shorter, and deceptively difficult. An opinion is not an argument until it survives the strongest objection to it, so most of the mentoring here is spent finding that objection and answering it honestly.
You will be assigned a mentor with a doctorate in a relevant field. Expect several rounds. The first is almost always about narrowing the question, and students routinely find this the hardest part, because a question broad enough to feel important is usually too broad to answer.
After the outline is agreed you draft, your mentor responds, and you revise. When the argument holds, the paper goes to editorial review, which is a separate reader who has not seen it before.
A mentor will not write your paper. If a draft arrives that the student cannot explain in conversation, we stop and go back to the outline.
Two issues a year. Submissions for an issue close roughly three months before it appears, because the mentoring and review rounds take that long when they are done properly. If you miss a close, your paper rolls to the next issue rather than being rushed.
The work must be the student’s own. Quote and cite freely, but present nothing as yours that is not.
On generative AI: use it to check your grammar or to explain a concept you are stuck on, the same way you would use a dictionary or a tutor. Do not use it to produce your argument or your prose. If a passage was generated, tell your mentor. We would far rather have that conversation before publication than after.
Papers involving human participants, including surveys of classmates, need to be discussed with your mentor before you collect anything.
Our authors are children, and we treat that as the constraint it is. By default a published paper shows a shortened name only, for example “Aarav S.”. A full name, a photograph or a school name appears only where a parent or guardian has given written consent for that specific item.
This is enforced in our systems, not just in our process: the database physically cannot store an author record flagged to display a photograph unless a consent record exists alongside it. Consent can be withdrawn at any time by writing to us, and we will remove the item.
See the privacy notice for the detail.