Youth Research Accelerator

Interactive Game: Research or Fake?

🎮 GAME: REAL STUDY OR COMPLETELY MADE UP?
We will give you 5 “study titles”.
✍️Your task: guess which ones are REAL published research and which ones are made up. Comment your answers for each one 🤓

1. "The Effect of Background Music Tempo on Math Problem-Solving Speed in Adolescents"

2. "Do Plants Grow Faster When Spoken to in Different Languages? A Comparative Study"

3. "Correlation Between Shoe Size and Leadership Ability in Corporate Executives"

4. "Sleep Deprivation and Its Effect on Emotional Regulation in Teenagers: Systematic Review"

5. "The Impact of Doomscrolling Before Bed on Next-Day Academic Performance in High School Students"

#reminder

🍂 Various effects in researches explain why you should be meticulous! #additional

👀 The Confirmation Bias:
Most researchers hunt for materials, patterns or other information which confirm their scientific hypotheses or ideas. For this reason, their investugations are often questionable and biased. To prevent the potential contradictions, formulate the position with denying materials, which might go against, and smoothly write it down in subtext.
👀 The Experimenter Effect:
It is a widespread phenomenon across psychologists and sociologists when they are subconsciously able to instill their aims in participants by specifically providing database or promoting ideas in specific consistency. For instance, while writing questionnaire, explorer may express questions, wherein first answer is unfavourable (with negative constructions) and another one is more preferable.
👀The Hawthorne Effect:
Participants are subconsciously inclined to alter their behaviour or answer "appropriately", when they know that they are observed. It causes to behave in accordance with the presumed expectations. Although their faked answers would be recognised, researches would, otherwise, fail to identify natural responses.
👀 The Publishing Bias:
Journals seldom aspire to select explorations, where the outcomes are predominantly or totally positive, rather than picking up a suitable and relevant ones. Therefore, it would be admittedly better not to get over bad results, but write attractive and positive sides of your conclusion.

🧠 FIELD SPOTLIGHT:

Neuroscience — The Science of YOU
Neuroscience is one of the fastest-growing fields in science — and it's more accessible to student researchers than most people think.

✏️ Neuroplasticity & Learning
Your brain physically rewires itself when you learn something new. Researchers are studying how sleep, stress, exercise, and even music affect this process. High school students can explore this through behavioral experiments and literature-based research.

🔍 The Teenage Brain The prefrontal cortex — responsible for decision-making and impulse control — doesn't fully develop until your mid-20s. There's enormous research being done on how this affects risk-taking, peer pressure, academic performance, and mental health in adolescents.

💻 Brain-Computer Interfaces
Companies like Neuralink are working on connecting human brains directly to computers. The ethical, medical, and technical questions this raises are wide open for research — especially in philosophy, ethics, and computer science crossovers.

💤 Sleep & Cognition
Why does pulling an all-nighter destroy your memory? How does REM sleep consolidate information? Sleep neuroscience is booming and incredibly relevant to student life.

📚 Mental Health & the Brain Depression, anxiety, and ADHD are being studied at the neurological level — not just psychological. Understanding the biology behind mental health is one of the most important research frontiers of our time.

🔬 Entry points for student researchers: surveys on sleep habits, literature reviews on neuroplasticity, or behavioral experiments testing memory and attention.

#useful

🤩QUESTIONNAIRES: How to make them (by steps)? #structure

🍂 Before writing questionnaires it is recommended to search for international or local communities in social media, where people are plausible to contribute your research, like YRA community (https://t.me/yracomm). It ensures an adequate amount of the participants.

🍂 Do not make questionnaires with a big number of questions involved in there. Beginners are more likely to overlook that the respondents may be idle or too busy to answer the numerous questions in a row.

🍂 Those templates must include questions without biased context. For instance, people will perhaps answer positively questions, like "Do you eat healthy food?". Try to hide your purposes, so that participants will sincerely answer neutral questions.

🍂 Use likert scales appropriately. It would be more helpful if there were variants as more as possible (strongly disagree 1 point, disagree 2 points, neutral/don't know 3 points, agree 4 points, strongly agree 5 points).

🍂 The most important is launching pilot test. Ask some of your buddies to check your questionnaire and give feedbacks. It would be much profitable to design variants even for lazy people. You can use this advices for surveys as well.

❓RESEARCH MYTHS THAT ARE HOLDING YOU BACK

❌ Myth 1: "Your research topic has to be completely original"
✅ Reality: Almost nothing in research is 100% new. Replicating a study in a different context, with a different population, or using a different method IS valid research. You don't need to reinvent the wheel — you need to add to it.

❌ Myth 2: "You need a lab or expensive equipment to do real research"
✅ Reality: Some of the most impactful research is done with surveys, interviews, publicly available data, or simple observation. Your tools don't determine the quality of your thinking.

❌ Myth 3: "If your hypothesis was wrong, your research failed"
✅ Reality: Disproving a hypothesis is just as valuable as confirming one. Science advances through negative results too. The failure is not testing your idea — the failure is never starting.

❌ Myth 4: "You need to be a genius to publish research"
✅ Reality: Student journals exist specifically for young researchers at all levels. What matters is a clear question, honest methodology, and well-presented findings — not a perfect IQ.

❌ Myth 5: "Research is a solo activity"
✅ Reality: The best researchers collaborate, get feedback, argue with peers, and learn from mentors. If you're doing everything alone in silence, you're making it harder than it needs to be.

#additional

🌐 Academic Search Engines & Databases

🌷 Google Scholar
What it does: The largest and most accessible search engine for academic literature. It searches across theses, books, abstracts, and articles from major university repositories and publishers.
Pro Tip: Use the "Cite" button under any search result — it instantly generates a ready-to-use citation formatted in APA, MLA, Harvard, or Chicago styles.

🌷 ResearchGate
What it does: Often described as a "social network for scientists." Researchers frequently upload their own papers here. If an article is behind a paywall on an official journal site, you can very often download the full-text version for free right here.

🌷 BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
What it does: One of the world's most massive search engines designed specifically for academic web resources. It only indexes verified scientific servers, meaning over 60% of the indexed documents are completely free, Open Access full texts.

🟢 AI-Powered Research Assistants
Unlike generic chatbots, these tools do not hallucinate or make things up. They search strictly within databases of real, published scientific literature and provide direct citations.

🌷 Consensus
What it does: An AI search engine that instantly aggregates scientific findings. If you ask a yes/no question (e.g., "Does social media reduce attention span?"), the AI analyzes hundreds of papers and extracts a "consensus meter" showing the percentage of studies that agree or disagree.

🌷 Elicit
What it does: Your ultimate companion for writing a Literature Review. When you type in a research question, Elicit finds the most relevant papers and automatically extracts them into a summary table, mapping out the methodologies used, key findings, and study limitations.

🤩 Reference Managers & Citation Tools
🌷 Zotero
What it does: An absolute must-have open-source assistant that collects, organizes, and formats your sources.
How it works: You install a browser extension. When you find a good paper online, you click a single button, and Zotero saves it to your library. When writing your paper in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, Zotero automatically inputs your in-text citations and builds a flawless bibliography at the end with one click.

✅ The Pre-Submission Checklist: 15 Minutes to Save Your Grade #materials

Writing the draft is only 80% of the job. The final 20% is editing. Before you hit that "Submit" or "Send" button, take 15 minutes to run your paper through this rapid technical checklist.
Minor formatting and grammatical errors can make even the most brilliant research look sloppy to a reviewer.

🌕 Visual Layout & Formatting

✔️ The "Font Uniformity" Check: Your entire paper uses exactly one academic font family (e.g., Times New Roman 12pt or Arial 11pt) from the title page to the bibliography.
✔️ Line Spacing: Double-spacing or 1.5 spacing is applied consistently everywhere, including blockquotes and references.
✔️ Page Numbers: Numbers are clearly visible in the header or footer of every single page (except the title page, if required).
✔️ Visual Hierarchy: All main section titles (Introduction, Methods, Results) are bolded and distinct from standard paragraph text.

🔗 Citations & References

✔️

The 1-to-1 Match:

Every single name inside your text (e.g., Smith, 2024) has a corresponding full source listed in your final reference list.

✔️

No Dead Links:

If you included URLs or DOIs in your bibliography, click on them to ensure they actually open the correct papers.

✔️

Punctuation Rules:

All periods go after the parentheses in your in-text citations, exactly like this: ⁠...according to the data (Davis, 2023).⁠

✔️

Et Al. Accuracy:

For papers with multiple authors, you used ⁠et al.⁠ correctly with a period only after the "al" (e.g., Green et al., 2022).

💼 Style & Academic Tone

✔️

The "I/We" Purge:

You have removed personal pronouns ("I think," "In my opinion") and replaced them with objective, passive, or third-person phrasing ("The data suggests," "It can be argued").

✔️

Contraction Check:

Words like don't, can't, won't, or it's are completely spelled out as do not, cannot, will not, and it is.

✔️

No Emotional Language:

Words like terrible, wonderful, shocking, or completely ruined are replaced with objective terms (significant decrease, substantial impact, limited efficacy).

🔋 Technical Details

✔️

File Naming:

Your final file isn't named "draft_final_v3.docx". Rename it professionally using your name and topic (e.g., ⁠Surname_ResearchPaper_2026.pdf⁠).

✔️

PDF Conversion:

You converted your document to PDF format to ensure your charts, tables, and spacing don't break when the reviewer opens it on a different device.

Hello everyone! We have recently explained that your ideas should be clearly and briefly presented.

🙂 Let's see if you are ready to transform academically HEAVY texts into understandable and light ones!

💔 "The etiological antecedents and pathophysiological concomitants of posttraumatic psychopathology demonstrate a multidimensional phenomenological constellation.." [Trauma Research, 2019]
💔 "Major depressive disorder constitutes a heterogeneous neuropsychiatric syndrome precipitated by dysregulated neuroendocrine homeostasis, particularly hypercortisolemia and blunted hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis responsivity, concomitant with serotonergic transmission deficits, monoaminergic dysregulation, and neuroplasticity impairment.." [Journal of Affective Disorders, 2021]
💔 "The epistemological incongruity between antecedent attitudinal orientations and dispositonal behavioral enactments precipitates psychological dissonance.." [Psychological Review, 1957]
💔 "Developmental attachmental schemata constitute endogenous representational frameworks that mediates interpersonal transactional patterns across ontogenetic trajectories.." [Developmental Psychology, 1973]
💔Reminder: You should transform the highlighted C2-level words into C1- or B2-words to make it easier to comprehend.

Youth Research Accelerator pinned a photo

Thank you to everyone who joined the webinar! 🌷

Unfortunately, the full recording didn't save, but we managed to capture the best part — a segment of the Q&A session. Sharing it here.

The questions were thoughtful, the conversation was honest, and the energy was real. If you couldn't make it or want to rewatch – here is what we have.

Thank you to our speaker for their openness and to everyone who showed up and participated. You make these sessions what they are.

More webinars coming soon 🎧

⚠️ Common Bottlenecks in PSYCHOLOGY researches:
#researchmistakes
🍭 Surveys:
Surprisingly, the processes of finding and selecting participants are an arduous journey. Students mostly conduct researches by taking questionnaire from their peers or friends, but this method is irrelevant in terms of general research, because it does not cover all age groups. For instance, emotional burnout might be widespread for all students, but it does not mean that the fatigue is a common social issue.

🍭 "Biodiversity" in topics:
Obviously, an individual should not make a research about reasons of depression, because it was investigated many times. However, this statement is true as long as the person is located in both the same time, when researches were held, and the same region where they were conducted. The reason is that some psychological phenomena are attributable to sociocultural aspects and features of parental behaviour.

🍭 Biased publications:
Young researchers are often misguided that their scientific work is supposed to have positive results matching a hypothesis. As a result, surveys with unexpected outcomes are ghosted or forgotten, but very few people take into consideration that other results lead to other conclusions which might be even more important.

🍭 Ethical constraints:
The vast majority of ideas is inappropriate or unable to be represented, because they are systematically about psychological traumas and traumatic moments. Even if a participart agreed to expose painful memories, their brain would subconsciously 'gaslight' them. It is more described by Leonard Mlodinov in his researches.

Reactions please 🦌

🍭🍭🍭🍭🍭🍭 🍭🍭🍭🍭🍭🍭🍭🍭
New free social impact competition for students applying abroad

Theme of the Competition
The competition is connected to UNESCO’s goals for inclusive education (SDG 4):
🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅 🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅🔅

🍭 What is the project about? What do participants need to do?
Participants identify hidden forms of discrimination in the admissions process that may not be officially prohibited but still act as barriers for applicants. They then develop a solution and create a product that helps recognize and address these barriers.

🍭 What is the purpose of the competition?
Our goal is simple: you will create a product (a website, card set, application, or any other format) that you can continue developing in the future while also strengthening your portfolio.

⏰ Start Date: June 8, 2026
Duration: 3 weeks

🍭 HOW TO PARTICIPATE

To participate in the competition, subscribe to the following Telegram channels:
🌷 Youth Research Accelerator
🌷 StartMind

After subscribing, send screenshots of your subscriptions (all submissions will be verified) to:
@kcanoox
@ucurie

Once your subscriptions are verified, you will receive a link to a private group where you can:
💔Find teammates for the competition
💔Meet other participants
💔Learn more details about the competition and its format
💔Ask any questions you may have

🍭What will I receive for participating?
Every participant is guaranteed to receive:
💔A certificate of participation
💔Valuable experience
💔A project that can be further developed after the competition

🍭Awards for 1st–3rd Place

💔

A certificate indicating your placement

💔

Your work will be featured on the Youth Research Accelerator website

🍭Additional Award for 1st Place

The Fair Admissions Toolkit

by Start Mind and Youth Research Accelerator
A collection of resources including:

💔

Admissions office email templates

💔

University policy review scripts

💔

Links to UNESCO documents on equality in education

🍭Additional Award for 2nd Place

Guide: “How to Apply to Competitive Research Programs”

🍭 Why Should YOU Participate?

This competition addresses an important issue faced by students applying abroad. By exploring hidden barriers in admissions, you will learn how to recognize discrimination while gaining a completed project and valuable teamwork experience.

Kindly reminding you that YRA core team applications are still open !! ✨ (we have new role - ambassador)

We are currently looking for motivated people to join our team in the following roles:
🌷Ambassador
🌷 Partnerships / Opportunities Manager
🌷 Design / Visual
🌷 SMM / Content Creator

🌷What you will get:
💔 A certificate with your role listed
💔 Verification of volunteer hours
💔 Experience working in an educational project
💔 A strong portfolio case

If you are interested in one of the roles - fill out the form
We will be happy to welcome new people to the team 💔💔

Preparing for you something …. 👀
Stay tuned 🍪

© How to find materials for your research? #additional
Even though searching for other investigatons might be considered easily, serious projects demand a hundred or above of researches to give evidences of your hypothesis or to make methodology proven either.

1️⃣First step. You need to extract core concepts and keywords, but also make sure that your ideas are expressed clearly and commonly. For instance, "The Quantum Neurochemical Resonance of Traumatic Post-War Existential Depression in Survivors of the Great Conflict" must be transferred to "Depression rates among World War II survivors compared to the general population".

2️⃣Second step. You can choose two ways of searching for relatable materials: use AI, like Perplexity, to select (not just copypaste them!!) investigations, aricles and other materials or sufficiently look for the sources in Google Scholar, PubMed, APA and others by using the keywords and common topic. Your aim should be to find survey that was conducted for the same purposes or by the same methdologies as yours. Do not forget to range these researches by main context and time period, because older surveys might be improper in some disciplines, like psychology or physics.

3️⃣Third step. Exploit those researches to bring up their sources or articles either, but do not copy all materials because you are better to base on a variety of the similar investigations. Look for the sources cited by a paper or sources that cited this paper.

🤩 Pre-submission enquiry: Its definition and main necessity
Occasionally authors are commonly unsure about suitability of their researches, and therefore they write pre-submission enquiries #publication

🍂 What does contain those enquiries?
As it was mentioned before, authors send their enquiries to the address pre-submission form after writing 250-word synopsis of the proposal with the intended list of explorers included at the end of the summary. The editorial staff is commonly set to respond applications by e-mail in three business days.

🍂 What the main idea of enquiries?
Researches might take a long time to be entirely written, so that the pre-submission summaries enable students and others to save significant part of their time and efforts. Another crucial advantage is that you can make numerous inquiries in the meantime!

🍂 How to write enquiries?
You must clearly highlight other explorations and scientists' works. Thus, your summary would explain the eligibility and importance of your main targets with methodology and results involved into the letter. Moreover, the synopsis is supposed to ask the editorial staff a direct question, like: "Do you believe that this study falls within the scope of your journal?".

🤩 Brain Workout: Paraphrasing (Part 2)
Challenge!

In academic writing, changing just a few words isn't enough - true paraphrasing means completely reshaping the sentence structure while keeping the core message intact.
Let’s take our skills to the next level with Round 2!

🌷The Task:
Here is a new sentence. Rewrite it in your own words. Change the grammar structure and use synonyms, but make sure the original meaning doesn't change.
Original Sentence:
"Regular physical exercise not only boosts a person's physical health but also significantly improves their mental well-being."

😭How to participate:
Drop your paraphrased version in the comments below.
Check out what others have written and leave a reaction on the best versions.
Help each other out by giving constructive feedback!