A year of work, on one poster.

Three of the largest research-and-fair pipelines in American secondary education: ISEF (the global benchmark), JSHS (the DoD-sponsored individual), and the National Science Bowl (the team buzzer). Different shapes; same emphasis on real work.

3 competitions 1 published 1 archived 1 in triage

In This Department

Three pipelines.

Published

Research · Global Fair

ISEF

22 categories · 12 compliance forms · 1 AI matrix.

8 official PDFs archived; the form-trigger matrix and AI-use table are encoded verbatim. The benchmark high-school research fair.

Society for Science · May →

Triage

Research · Individual

JSHS Symposium

8 categories · regional → national.

DoD-sponsored individual STEM research; over $400K in awards. US citizens / LPR only. Official site currently under reconstruction.

NSTA / DoD · April →

National Science Bowl

Biology · Chemistry · Earth · Energy · Math · Physics.

~10,000 students across 115 regional tournaments. 24 sample-question sets normalized; 864-row structured data CSV produced.

DOE · April–May Finals →

An editor's note

ISEF is a whole calendar, not a date.

ISEF is unusual in this library because it is not a paper, a pitch, or a quiz — it's a research project, judged from a poster, after a year of work that may have required IRB approval, BSL-2 containment, or vertebrate protocol sign-off depending on the subject. Most of the difficulty is compliance, not science.

Our ISEF playbook makes the compliance layer legible: a form-trigger matrix covering Forms 1, 1A, 1B, 1C, 2, 3, 4, 5A, 5B, 6A, 6B, 7, plus the BSL-1/BSL-2 layer and the Field Safety layer. The point is to know which forms you must file in Stage 0, not in Stage 6.

If you want research without compliance

National Science Bowl is a study-only path: there's no project. JSHS is the closest individual-research analogue without ISEF's compliance load.

— The Editors