How to Do Research in High School | RISE Research
How to Do Research in High School | RISE Research
Shana Saiesh
Shana Saiesh
Most high schoolers think of research as something done in a university lab by professors with decades of training. But the truth is, research is more accessible than that. Students with zero experience have gotten research papers published on topics from the economics of climate change to delivery mechanisms for CRISPR technology to AI policy in the European Union. None of them knew what they were doing at the beginning.
What they had was an idea they really wanted to research, and a way to make that happen. Here are the steps in six parts.
Step 1: Find a Question, Not Just a Topic
This is where most students spend too little time. A topic is not a research question.
"Climate change" is a topic. "Do carbon pricing policies reduce industrial emissions faster in economies with high energy subsidies?" is a research question. The difference is specificity. A question has an answerable scope, connects to existing literature, and points toward a method.
Start broad. Read widely in a subject you care about, including news articles, popular books, and then academic papers. The more you read, the more gaps and contradictions you notice. Those gaps are where research questions live. When you find yourself thinking "but what about..." or "that doesn't quite explain..." — write it down. That is often the beginning of a project.
Once you have a rough question, search Google Scholar to see if it has already been answered. You want a question that others have explored (which means it matters) but that has not been definitively resolved.
Step 2: Do a Real Literature Review
Before designing any study or writing any argument, you need to know what already exists on your topic. This is the literature review, and it is not optional.
Search Google Scholar and, for science and medicine, PubMed. For humanities and social sciences, JSTOR covers a large portion of the available literature for free. Use specific search terms, not broad ones. Try the "cited by" feature in Google Scholar to find newer papers that build on foundational work.
Read at least 10 to 15 papers before you finalize your research question. Note what each paper found, how it was conducted, and what its limitations were. The limitations sections of published papers are especially useful. They often point directly to the gaps your project could address.
Step 3: Choose Your Method
How you conduct research depends on your field, your question, and what resources you have access to.
Literature review or systematic review. You synthesize existing published research to answer a specific question. No lab required. Best for students without access to experimental facilities. Works across all disciplines.
Survey or observational study. You collect original data by surveying people or observing a phenomenon. Useful in psychology, sociology, economics, and education research. Google Forms works fine for data collection at this scale.
Computational or bioinformatics analysis. You analyze publicly available datasets using tools like Python or R. Public data sources include the World Bank, FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), the Gene Expression Omnibus, and Kaggle. No lab, no physical equipment.
Original experiment. If you have access to a school lab, a university mentorship, or a summer research program, original experimental work is possible. This is the hardest to do independently but produces the strongest results for science competitions.
Whatever method you choose, document it carefully as you go. Your methods section is a record of exactly what you did, specific enough that someone else could replicate it.
Step 4: Find a Mentor
Research at the high school level is significantly harder without someone more experienced reviewing your question, methodology, and write-up. Most journals that accept student submissions require a teacher or faculty co-author. And practically speaking, a mentor catches errors you cannot see yet because you do not know enough to notice them.
A few routes to find one. Your school's biology, history, or economics teacher is an underused resource; many have graduate training and are willing to supervise a focused project. Local university professors can be cold-emailed; the response rate is low but not zero, and a specific, well-prepared email asking to contribute to existing work outperforms a vague request for mentorship. University outreach programs and summer research programs offer structured access to faculty mentors.
Summer research programs for high school students offer students a structured way of exploring research with the support of expert mentors. Over the course of this 8 -10 week program, students work one-on-one under the guidance of PhD researchers to create an independent project, which by the end of the program is developed into a final paper with opportunities for publication. The process is designed to help students acquire hands-on experience in research, critical analysis, writing, and presenting their ideas in a clear manner.
Step 5: Write the Paper
The structure of a research paper is mostly standard across disciplines, with minor variations by field.
Abstract is a 150 to 250-word summary of the entire paper: question, method, findings, significance. Write it last.
Introduction establishes why your question matters, reviews the relevant literature, and states your specific research question or hypothesis. This is where your literature review shows up in condensed form.
Methods describes exactly what you did. Specific enough to replicate. No vagueness.
Results reports what you found, without interpretation. Data, patterns, outcomes.
Discussion is where analysis happens. What do the results mean? How do they relate to existing literature? What are the limitations of your study? What questions remain open?
References cites every source used, formatted in the style required by your target journal.
Before you write, read at least five papers published in your target journal. Notice how they are structured, how long each section is, and what tone they use. Imitate that structure until you develop your own instincts.
Step 6: Submit and Revise
Most students treat submission as the final step and rejection as failure. Both assumptions are wrong.
Submission is a middle step. Journals desk-reject papers that do not meet basic requirements: wrong length, wrong format, out of scope, obvious methodological errors. A desk rejection in two weeks means something specific is fixable. A rejection after peer review, with reviewer comments, is valuable feedback that usually makes the paper stronger if you act on it.
Most published researchers have had papers rejected. The process is iterative. Revise based on feedback, re-read the author guidelines of the next target journal, reformat if needed, and resubmit.
Journals worth knowing for first submissions: Journal of Student Research accepts work across disciplines. Journal of Emerging Investigators publishes original STEM research by high school students. The Young Researcher covers social sciences and humanities. National High School Journal of Science is free and student-run with faster turnaround.
What Research Actually Does for You
The honest answer is that published research helps college applications, but that is the second-order effect. The first-order effect is that doing research at this level teaches you how to think about a problem in a way that coursework rarely does. You learn to tolerate ambiguity, revise your assumptions, and produce something that withstands external scrutiny.
Yale and Columbia have explicitly begun encouraging students to submit research abstracts and full papers as application supplements. Internally, programs like Indigo Research found that close to 90% of students accepted to top-15 universities in the 2024-2025 cycle had at least one published research project on their application. That number is worth sitting with.
But the students who benefit most from research are not the ones who published. They are the ones who can talk about what they found, what surprised them, and what they would do differently. That fluency is what comes through in essays and interviews. The publication is the proof of it.
FAQs
Q: What grade should I start research?
A: Grade 10 or 11 is ideal. Grade 9 works if you have a clear interest area. Starting in Grade 12 is possible but tight; the publication timeline at most journals runs 6 to 12 months.
Q: How long does a research project take?
A: From question to submission-ready paper: 4 to 6 months with consistent effort and mentor guidance. Longer if you are working independently.
Q: Can I do research in humanities or social sciences, not just STEM?
A: Yes. History, economics, psychology, political science, and philosophy all have journals that accept high school submissions. Ivy League admissions officers specifically note that humanities research is underrepresented, which means competition is thinner than in STEM.
Author: Written by Shana Saiesh
Shana Saiesh is a sophomore at Ashoka University pursuing a BA (Hons.) in English with minors in International Relations and Psychology. She works with education-focused initiatives and mentorship-driven programs, contributing to operations, research and editorial work. Alongside her academics, she is involved in student-facing reports that combine research, strategy, and communication.
Most high schoolers think of research as something done in a university lab by professors with decades of training. But the truth is, research is more accessible than that. Students with zero experience have gotten research papers published on topics from the economics of climate change to delivery mechanisms for CRISPR technology to AI policy in the European Union. None of them knew what they were doing at the beginning.
What they had was an idea they really wanted to research, and a way to make that happen. Here are the steps in six parts.
Step 1: Find a Question, Not Just a Topic
This is where most students spend too little time. A topic is not a research question.
"Climate change" is a topic. "Do carbon pricing policies reduce industrial emissions faster in economies with high energy subsidies?" is a research question. The difference is specificity. A question has an answerable scope, connects to existing literature, and points toward a method.
Start broad. Read widely in a subject you care about, including news articles, popular books, and then academic papers. The more you read, the more gaps and contradictions you notice. Those gaps are where research questions live. When you find yourself thinking "but what about..." or "that doesn't quite explain..." — write it down. That is often the beginning of a project.
Once you have a rough question, search Google Scholar to see if it has already been answered. You want a question that others have explored (which means it matters) but that has not been definitively resolved.
Step 2: Do a Real Literature Review
Before designing any study or writing any argument, you need to know what already exists on your topic. This is the literature review, and it is not optional.
Search Google Scholar and, for science and medicine, PubMed. For humanities and social sciences, JSTOR covers a large portion of the available literature for free. Use specific search terms, not broad ones. Try the "cited by" feature in Google Scholar to find newer papers that build on foundational work.
Read at least 10 to 15 papers before you finalize your research question. Note what each paper found, how it was conducted, and what its limitations were. The limitations sections of published papers are especially useful. They often point directly to the gaps your project could address.
Step 3: Choose Your Method
How you conduct research depends on your field, your question, and what resources you have access to.
Literature review or systematic review. You synthesize existing published research to answer a specific question. No lab required. Best for students without access to experimental facilities. Works across all disciplines.
Survey or observational study. You collect original data by surveying people or observing a phenomenon. Useful in psychology, sociology, economics, and education research. Google Forms works fine for data collection at this scale.
Computational or bioinformatics analysis. You analyze publicly available datasets using tools like Python or R. Public data sources include the World Bank, FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), the Gene Expression Omnibus, and Kaggle. No lab, no physical equipment.
Original experiment. If you have access to a school lab, a university mentorship, or a summer research program, original experimental work is possible. This is the hardest to do independently but produces the strongest results for science competitions.
Whatever method you choose, document it carefully as you go. Your methods section is a record of exactly what you did, specific enough that someone else could replicate it.
Step 4: Find a Mentor
Research at the high school level is significantly harder without someone more experienced reviewing your question, methodology, and write-up. Most journals that accept student submissions require a teacher or faculty co-author. And practically speaking, a mentor catches errors you cannot see yet because you do not know enough to notice them.
A few routes to find one. Your school's biology, history, or economics teacher is an underused resource; many have graduate training and are willing to supervise a focused project. Local university professors can be cold-emailed; the response rate is low but not zero, and a specific, well-prepared email asking to contribute to existing work outperforms a vague request for mentorship. University outreach programs and summer research programs offer structured access to faculty mentors.
Summer research programs for high school students offer students a structured way of exploring research with the support of expert mentors. Over the course of this 8 -10 week program, students work one-on-one under the guidance of PhD researchers to create an independent project, which by the end of the program is developed into a final paper with opportunities for publication. The process is designed to help students acquire hands-on experience in research, critical analysis, writing, and presenting their ideas in a clear manner.
Step 5: Write the Paper
The structure of a research paper is mostly standard across disciplines, with minor variations by field.
Abstract is a 150 to 250-word summary of the entire paper: question, method, findings, significance. Write it last.
Introduction establishes why your question matters, reviews the relevant literature, and states your specific research question or hypothesis. This is where your literature review shows up in condensed form.
Methods describes exactly what you did. Specific enough to replicate. No vagueness.
Results reports what you found, without interpretation. Data, patterns, outcomes.
Discussion is where analysis happens. What do the results mean? How do they relate to existing literature? What are the limitations of your study? What questions remain open?
References cites every source used, formatted in the style required by your target journal.
Before you write, read at least five papers published in your target journal. Notice how they are structured, how long each section is, and what tone they use. Imitate that structure until you develop your own instincts.
Step 6: Submit and Revise
Most students treat submission as the final step and rejection as failure. Both assumptions are wrong.
Submission is a middle step. Journals desk-reject papers that do not meet basic requirements: wrong length, wrong format, out of scope, obvious methodological errors. A desk rejection in two weeks means something specific is fixable. A rejection after peer review, with reviewer comments, is valuable feedback that usually makes the paper stronger if you act on it.
Most published researchers have had papers rejected. The process is iterative. Revise based on feedback, re-read the author guidelines of the next target journal, reformat if needed, and resubmit.
Journals worth knowing for first submissions: Journal of Student Research accepts work across disciplines. Journal of Emerging Investigators publishes original STEM research by high school students. The Young Researcher covers social sciences and humanities. National High School Journal of Science is free and student-run with faster turnaround.
What Research Actually Does for You
The honest answer is that published research helps college applications, but that is the second-order effect. The first-order effect is that doing research at this level teaches you how to think about a problem in a way that coursework rarely does. You learn to tolerate ambiguity, revise your assumptions, and produce something that withstands external scrutiny.
Yale and Columbia have explicitly begun encouraging students to submit research abstracts and full papers as application supplements. Internally, programs like Indigo Research found that close to 90% of students accepted to top-15 universities in the 2024-2025 cycle had at least one published research project on their application. That number is worth sitting with.
But the students who benefit most from research are not the ones who published. They are the ones who can talk about what they found, what surprised them, and what they would do differently. That fluency is what comes through in essays and interviews. The publication is the proof of it.
FAQs
Q: What grade should I start research?
A: Grade 10 or 11 is ideal. Grade 9 works if you have a clear interest area. Starting in Grade 12 is possible but tight; the publication timeline at most journals runs 6 to 12 months.
Q: How long does a research project take?
A: From question to submission-ready paper: 4 to 6 months with consistent effort and mentor guidance. Longer if you are working independently.
Q: Can I do research in humanities or social sciences, not just STEM?
A: Yes. History, economics, psychology, political science, and philosophy all have journals that accept high school submissions. Ivy League admissions officers specifically note that humanities research is underrepresented, which means competition is thinner than in STEM.
Author: Written by Shana Saiesh
Shana Saiesh is a sophomore at Ashoka University pursuing a BA (Hons.) in English with minors in International Relations and Psychology. She works with education-focused initiatives and mentorship-driven programs, contributing to operations, research and editorial work. Alongside her academics, she is involved in student-facing reports that combine research, strategy, and communication.
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