The Young Researcher

John Lambersky on how RSGC students built a peer-reviewed journal, contributing to global scholarship

In 2017, John Lambersky and a group of RSGC students founded a peer-reviewed journal, publishing original academic research of ambitious secondary students. The world noticed.

by John Lambersky Ph.D

When we launched our Advanced Placement Capstone program a decade ago, we wanted opportunities for students to grow as researchers, writers, and presenters. We wanted to ensure our students found the transition to university smooth, and to prepare our students for rigorous scholarship. We wanted a chance to be bold and ambitious, and demonstrate that a school with humane and human values could also succeed in the marketplace of ideas and help students to make their mark. We wanted to produce a home for young men who were driven to not simply learn things, but to shape the wider community of learners and scholarship. There was no limit to our thinking.

One part of that boldness was a novel and audacious experiment in knowledge creation and dissemination, in ways that most students only could experience, if at all, while in graduate school: creating a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Such journals are considered the gold standard in academic research and writing. Since none existed for high school students at the time, we decided to launch one. We called it The Young Researcher, a journal dedicated to the publication of original research from secondary school students. Our students would work alongside a few dozen expert researchers, many of whom are graduates of our school or parents of students or fellow faculty, to produce the world’s only publication of its kind. It was our AP Research students acting as curators and editors, even intellectual gatekeepers, alongside a field of subject experts, to make something real and send it into the world. We would find the world’s best research from high school students and publish it.

Locations of submitting authors in 2023.

We built it, and they came.

As of this writing, 240,845 readers have downloaded our journal. These readers are mostly drawn from active research libraries and faculties in universities across the world. Our school’s logo has been seen in every article, placing us at the vanguard of intellectually ambitious schools, literally without peers. Ambitious AP Research students from around the world get in contact weekly to be part of our journal. Thousands of hopeful students from dozens of countries in every part of the globe have submitted their work to our own student editors for consideration. Last year, we collaborated with Harvard on a special edition. They were impressed with what we were doing, they sought us out, and they wanted to be part of it – to be a small part of our school, to work alongside our students.

That is quite a reach. Our students, working with their instructor and associate editor Matt Mooney and me, have helped to shape important corners of academic discussion and provided a venue for the next generation of researchers. We sift through the hundreds of papers we receive each year, identifying which merit further consideration and polish; then, we send that smaller promising group of papers out to a group of subject experts (typically, researchers in their fields, often working at universities) who help us in our selection and editing and publication decisions, determining which papers are best and how they can be improved; our students provide suggestions and revisions to that group of papers, and make the final decisions on what will be published and with what final edits. When we think it has reached the highest level of quality possible, we publish online, and readers start finding it through academic databases.

This journal isn’t a vanity project: we made a decision early on that being in the AP Research class is no guarantee of being published. Indeed, our acceptance rate hovers around 5%, and that is true for our own students submitting. This is a genuinely blind peer-review process. This isn’t, as our Headmaster Stephen Beatty sometimes says at our proficiency awards ceremony, house league soccer.

In the decade of its life, topics published in the journal range from the history of popular music in Cambodia, to potential side effects of nanomedication used to treat cancer.

Some of our students have made the cut, of course, and their papers passed through the same process found in the world’s best academic publishing circles. Ethan Kelly ’17 presented a secondary data analysis of the effectiveness of concussion protocols in professional football. Andrew Pyper, ‘18 published an evaluation of formative assessment in schools, using RSGC as a case study. These and other young researchers have started a larger conversation in the scholarly literature, their work having been cited by active academics in their fields, and their names appearing as references in PhD dissertations and established journals around the world.

This is our school. The “good guy” school can also be the school of quiet and diligent academic excellence in ways so interesting and deep it is hard to explain in the confines of an elevator pitch.

This journal, our journal, and the articles inside it, are perhaps small steps and modest things: words on pages, read quietly in study by students in libraries and dorm rooms and by academics in their carrells. But those acts are actually part of the fruits of civilization that we need to nurture and protect and celebrate. Making this global journal and sending it out into the world – these are acts of literature, of humanity, of science, of something innately wonderful and powerful.

It reminds me of small moments of my own childhood spent in the company of books and magazines. When I was a boy, in the 1980s and 90s, we had very little money to spare. One of the things my mother would not compromise on, however, was a subscription to the National Geographic magazine. In the many readings and rereadings of those yellow treasures, I noticed the mission statement inside the cover. It said it was dedicated to the “increase and diffusion” of knowledge.

These papers in our journal, these young researchers from every part of the globe, demonstrate something important: truth exists, though nature hides it as best it can. As researchers, it is our job to find those truths, making revisions, additions, and subtractions as we go. Each step in the journey reveals something new.

So here’s to steps. Here’s to increase. Here’s to diffusion.

Here’s to Royal St. George’s College.

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John Lambersky is a member of the RSGC faculty and Head of Canadian and World Studies. He is founding editor of The Young Researcher, this year entering its 10th issue. The journal’s mission is to provide a larger audience for the original academic research of ambitious secondary students, provide a forum for peer-review, and create a community of young researchers. For an archive of all the papers that have been published in the journal since it was begun in 2017, click here.