Is International Youth Researchers Conference legitimate?

Student Lounge
1

Recently I’ve been doing some independant research, and I was originally going to submit my project to a small science fair around my area, but I found an email in my promotions inbox from IYRC, which seems to be a research conference specifically for high school students. However, when I signed up for the project workshop, it seems like only three people attended the session and only around 20 people signed up, which was suspicious to me since I expected 50+ people to attend. Also, in the information session, it stated that most, if not all, papers would get published, which doesn’t sound like high quality research if nearly all of the papers are getting published. The founder of the conference is also the founder of another business dedicated to helping students produce research papers, so I was worried that this conference might just be a fake conference where students can pay the other company to publish their work. I found that a bit suspicious for a conference, and even though it’s only been around for 2 or so years, does anyone know if this research conference is legit? Thank you so much for your help!

Here’s the link to their website: https://www.the-iyrc.org/

2

I guess it depend on what you are looking for. The FAQs mentions:

Our team of reviewers are qualified academics across a variety of STEM, humanities, and social science disciplines. Each reviewer is trained to provide meaningful and structured feedback. Reviewers will recommend to the editorial team to accept unconditionally, to accept with minor or major revisions, or to reject a paper.

So it doesn’t sound like this is a pay to publish scheme. If you want some experience presenting research, this seems like a fine option.

On the other hand, if you want to add this on applications, there’s no guarantee this will be seen as an impressive accomplishment.

3

If you are doing this for fun, go ahead. If you are doing this for college applications, no, no one has ever heard of this site.

4

Thanks for the reply! I’m doing this for fun, but I’m mostly worried that it’s just a fake company and I’ll get scammed rather than that colleges won’t see it as impressive because it’s not well recognized. I’m not sure if I should take the risk, since I’ve put so much into the research…

5

Great, thank you for your reply! During their informational session, they said that nearly all papers would get published, which is why I was worried, so hopefully they have an actual team of reviewers!