Author Eligibility and Information

All manuscripts at eiRxiv must have at least two authors, one or more student authors and a senior author (an adult). Authorship is the highest form of acknowledgement you can give to someone who contributed to your manuscript.

• All high-school students are encouraged to submit their work
• Initial submission of manuscript must occur prior to the student author’s enrollment in university.
• Access to university labs and advanced techniques not required

• A senior mentor must be included as the last author on all eiRxiv manuscripts
• A teacher, college/university professor, postdoctoral fellow, or senior graduate student may serve as a senior mentor if research was performed in a school or university.
• A parent can serve as a senior mentor if research was conducted at home
• We do not allow undergraduate students to serve as the senior author for eiRxiv submissions.
• All senior mentors must have a valid email address provided in their author information on eiRxiv.

In scientific writing authors are listed in order of their contribution to the work. This means that the author listed first did the most experimental design, data collection and analysis, and/or writing, and the author listed last did the least. In fact, the last/senior author often only contributes in reviewing experimental design and/or the manuscript.

If any student authors contributed equally to the work this can be denoted by placing an asterisk (*) after their name and the statement “these authors contributed equally to this work” underneath the list of author affiliations. If any senior authors should have equal contribution, please do the same as for student authors, but use a symbol other than an asterisk.

Here is an example of how to list out authors for a manuscript.

If the author contributions look like this:

1st authors: Jane Doe, Bob Smith

2nd author: Jack Trice

3rd author: Alice Ball

4th/Senior author: Rosalind Franklin

Then they should be written like this on your cover page (including affiliations):

Jane Doe1*, Bob Smith2*, Jack Trice3, Alice Ball4, Rosalind Franklin5

1 Anonymous High School, Plaintown, Illinois

2 Super Secret High School, Metropolis, Illinois

3 Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa

4 University of Hawai’i, Honolulu, Hawai’i

5 University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England

*These authors contributed equally to this work

You will still need a senior mentor. If you discussed your experimental design with a teacher or parent, or if they helped edit your manuscript, then this should be acknowledged by listing them as a senior author.

eiRxiv requires two (2) authors on every manuscript - at least one student and senior (adult) author. If a student did all the experimentation on their own, they must ask an adult to serve as a senior author on your manuscript. 

Under no circumstances does eiRxiv allow student author(s) to be the sole author(s) of a manuscript.

Note: eiRxiv does not encourage students to undertake experiments without adult supervision and guidance.

An adult still MUST approve the manuscript on behalf of the student author(s) on the manuscript. We still require a separate adult to approve even if any of the student authors are 18+ years at the time of submission.

A student can create a student account but must list an adult mentor and email address. Once the adult mentor accepts the invitation, the student can move forward to submit their preprint.

We are happy to assist with author order if there are questions regarding it or if authors need to be added or removed. If an author is being removed we will need to see communication from the author being removed that they have consented to this (and we reserve the right to independently verify this with them as well).