About the Journal
Work held to the standard
of the field it belongs to.
TISSR publishes original scholarship in the humanities and social sciences written by students still in secondary school — and reviews it the way a journal reviews any other paper.
The Premise
Most writing done in secondary school is graded against what a student is expected to manage at that age. That makes sense in a classroom. It also means a strong paper and a generously marked one can look identical, and the person who wrote it has no way of telling them apart.
We started the TISSR to raise that bar. We read every submission the way a journal reads any paper. Does the evidence support the claim? Are the sources used, or only listed? Does the argument survive the first serious objection a specialist would raise? Papers that clear that standard get published. We would rather run a short issue than fill one.
The feedback matters just as much to us. Every author gets the referees’ written reports, whether their paper is accepted or declined. For most students it is the first time anyone has read their work that closely and told them plainly what holds and what does not. That is what makes the next paper better.
Scope
We publish across the humanities and social sciences, including but not limited to:
- History
- Political, economic, social, intellectual, and art history; historiography
- Philosophy
- Ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science and technology
- Economics
- Micro and macro theory, development, labor, economic history, political economy
- Social Sciences
- Anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, human geography
- Literature & Classics
- Comparative literature, classical languages, literary theory, translation studies
- The Arts
- Art history, musicology, film and media studies, architectural history
- Law & Policy
- Legal history, jurisprudence, public policy, regulatory analysis
If your paper sits outside these but belongs to the humanities or social sciences broadly, send it. The list is a description of what we have published, not a fence.
Independence
Referees are told nothing about you. Not your name, not your school, not whether you paid the fee or had it waived. They are handed a paper and asked one question: does it hold?Editorial Policy — Volume I
A Nonprofit
TISSR exists for two groups: the fields we publish in, and the students willing to do hard work at an age when nobody is asking them to. Those students are taking a risk. They are writing to a standard no one has taught them, then handing it to strangers who are free to say no.
Our job is to make that risk worth taking. In practice that means a careful reading by someone who knows the subject, written down and sent to you, whatever we decide.
Where the money goes
Submission costs $64.99, waived in full for any student for whom it is a barrier. It pays referees for their time, funds outreach to schools without research programmes, and keeps the archive online. Nothing about it is a donation to us. The full breakdown →
Connections
Reviewers are drawn from a network shaped by the nation’s most competitive research and liberal arts universities.
They include current undergraduate scholars, university alumni, and individuals with prior institutional affiliation now working at the forefront of their disciplines. Every manuscript is held to the standard of rigor these reviewers were trained to uphold.
Institutions represented in that network include:
- Amherst College
- Boston College
- Boston University
- Bowdoin College
- Columbia University
- Cornell University
- Georgetown University
- Harvard University
- Indiana University
- Johns Hopkins University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- New York University
- Northeastern University
- Rice University
- Stanford University
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of Chicago
- University of Michigan
- University of Pennsylvania
- University of Southern California
- University of Texas at Austin
- Washington University in St. Louis
- Yale University
These institutions are named only to describe where our editors and authors study or have studied. They are not partners, sponsors, or affiliates of The International Secondary Scholarship Review, and none of them has endorsed, sponsored, reviewed, or is otherwise associated with this journal or its contents.
Policies
Authorship and originality
Submissions must be the author’s own work. Papers written for a class, an extended essay, or an independent research programme are all eligible, provided the author wrote them. Substantive help must be acknowledged. Work generated by a language model and submitted as the author’s own is grounds for permanent exclusion.
Anonymity in review
Referees do not see the author’s name, school, or country, and authors do not learn the identity of their referees. This is not a formality — it is the mechanism that makes the standard the same for a student in Manila and a student in Massachusetts.
Rights
Authors retain full copyright in their work. Publication in the TISSR grants us a non-exclusive right to host and distribute the paper. You may republish it anywhere, including in a later academic context, with acknowledgement.
Corrections
Errors of fact identified after publication are corrected on the record, with a dated note. We do not silently amend published papers.
Contact
For submissions, corrections, or questions about the review process: questions@tissr.org