A Student’s Guide to the Journal of Emerging Investigators
Are you a middle- or high-school scientist with a passion for learning about the world through independent research? If so, you may be interested in conducting a research project with publication-worthy results. Independent research projects are a great way to produce scientific work, generate a strong hypothesis, design an experiment to answer your question, and get practice analyzing data. If this sounds interesting, but you don’t know how to publish your work in a journal, read on to learn more about the Journal of Emerging Investigators!
The Journal of Emerging Investigators (JEI) connects students with scientists in universities and research laboratories. It aims to help its authors learn about the scientific method, practice science communication skills, and gain recognition as emerging scientists. JEI is known for accepting any work that meets this standard and for providing the most in-depth and critical feedback of any peer-reviewed research journal without a competitive selection process.
Read on to learn more about the guidelines and requirements to submit to the Journal of Emerging Investigators, its standard for publication, and what it looks for in a research paper.
Journal of Emerging Investigators Publication Requirements
Let us first go over some important information about how to publish in the Journal of Emerging Investigators. Their requirements are as follows:
All manuscripts must have two authors, one or more students, and one senior mentor
All manuscripts must explicitly include a clearly stated hypothesis
Manuscripts must reflect original work and cannot be descriptive research or reviews
For research involving vertebrate animals and human subjects, consult the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) guidelines
At this time, JEI does not accept any work related to the covid-19 epidemic. If your work involves this topic, contact submissions@emerginginvestigators.org before submitting it
Please always check directly with JEI’s Official Submission Guide for the latest and most up-to-date information.
Journal of Emerging Investigators Guidelines
Once you have met the above requirements, you will need to complete your work and craft a manuscript detailing your work and findings. Here, we will outline some of the general guidelines your research and manuscript should follow so that you are sure to have your work meet the Journal of Emerging Investigators’ standard for publication.
First, as mentioned above, your paper should focus on hypothesis-driven research. From the outset, your research should be centered around a clear, testable, and falsifiable hypothesis that you accept or reject based on your experimental results. This is the most important part of your research and will be one of the most decisive factors for whether or not the Journal of Emerging Investigators accepts your research.
Your work should be original. It does not need to be completely novel in the field at large, but it must be new to you and cannot have been taught in your schoolwork. Your hypothesis should not be too general (i.e., “Disease X results from the expression of genes” rather than a particular set of genes), but it should not be so complex that you need a multi-part thesis statement.
Your manuscript should be broken into the following parts:
A Title Page, including a title of 110 characters or less (including spaces) and the authors and their schools/institutions in order of contribution with the mentor listed last
An Abstract (under 250 words) summarizing the reason for the study, the research question and central hypothesis, a summary of the results, and your conclusions
An Introduction that briefly describes the topic of the paper, provides necessary background information, states the hypothesis, and briefly summarizes the conclusions
A Results section that describes how you tested your research question, discusses experimental controls and statistical analysis, describes the rationale for the experiment, briefly explains how it was performed, and interprets data and figures
A Discussion section that interprets the results, draws conclusions from the data, discusses limitations that might have caused error or bias, addresses the significance of the results, and discusses possible future experiments
A Materials and Methods section describes the methods in enough detail that a different scientist could perform the same experiment and achieve the same results
A References page that cites peer-reviewed articles, official websites, textbooks, news articles, scientific magazines, or encyclopedias in MLA format
An Acknowledgements section to thank those who made contributions to your work
And, if applicable, an Appendix with any code uploaded to a GitHub page or full-text survey questions for survey-based studies
For a more in-depth walk-through during the submission process, the Journal of Emerging Investigators has created a helpful guide with all the detailed information you need.
Please always check directly with JEI’s Official Submission Guide for the latest and most up-to-date information.
The Review Process
Now that you know what the requirements and guidelines are for submission to the Journal of Emerging Investigators, you are well on your way to having your submission accepted! The next step of the publication process is called peer review.
Generally, it will take about two weeks for the managing editor of the Journal of Emerging Investigators to get back to you with comments and several weeks bouncing between you, peer reviewers, copy editors, managing editors, and proofing editors. This process can be long and involved at times, involving weeks of peer review spread out between eleven people!
This may seem daunting, but it is a process that all scientists will learn to manage once they start publishing manuscripts. By learning it now, you will master the peer review process as you publish more papers. Not only that, the Journal of Emerging Investigators peer review process will instantly lend your work a level of credibility that you won’t get with journals that skip this process. That is to say, it will be completely worth the wait once you are published!
If you are interested in submitting work to the Journal of Emerging Investigators, consider applying to the 1:1 Mentorship Program at InspiritAI! Our mentors – hailing from the world's top research institutions and tech companies – will walk you through an entire research project from start to end. Whether you are a coding novice or a virtuoso, our individualized mentorship program will help you develop an exceptional research project with novel and well-defined results that you can use in your JEI submission. For more information, do not hesitate to contact InspiritAI with questions.
