The Concord Review is the only journal in the world that publishes the academic history research of secondary students, and it has held that position since 1987. It is also, by its own published figures, brutally selective: roughly 5% of submissions are accepted. This guide is a realistic account of what publication takes — the numbers, the deadline mechanics, what accepted papers actually look like, and a working plan — verified against the journal's own submission pages at tcr.org.
The Honest Numbers First
Before committing a year of work, you should know exactly what you are signing up for:
Acceptance rate:: around 5%, stated by the journal itself
Length:: 5,000 to 10,000 or more words, and that count includes endnotes and bibliography
The real bar:: the average published paper exceeds 8,000 words; some run past 15,000
Cost to submit:: 70 US dollars, which includes an electronic subscription to the journal
Eligibility:: the paper must be completed before you finish secondary school, sole-authored, and previously unpublished
Read those numbers again. An 8,000-word sole-authored research paper is not a school assignment with extra effort — it is a genuine piece of undergraduate-scale scholarship. That is precisely why it carries weight, and why most submissions fail.
What Actually Gets Published
Reading published issues reveals patterns that the submission guidelines only imply:
An argument, not a report.: Published papers answer a contested question — they do not summarise what happened. "The causes of X" is a report; "why the standard explanation of X is wrong" is a paper.
Real engagement with historians.: Accepted authors position themselves inside the historiography: they name the scholars who disagree and take a side. A paper that never cites a historian's interpretation is a book report with endnotes.
Any topic, any country, any century.: The journal has published authors from 46 countries on everything from ancient states to twentieth-century policy. There is no preferred topic — but there is a preference for depth over sweep.
Narrow beats broad, every time.: A tightly-scoped question you can actually exhaust — one institution, one episode, one decision — outperforms a survey of a war or an empire.
Primary sources somewhere in the spine.: Not every paragraph, but the argument's key joints should rest on documents, archives, newspapers, or records, not only on other people's books.
A practical corollary for students outside the US and UK: local and regional topics are an advantage. An archive, institution, or episode near you that no English-language historian has fully worked over gives you material the judges have not read a hundred times.
Five Topic Shapes That Work
"Pick a narrow topic" is easy to say and hard to do. In practice, publishable student papers tend to take one of a few recognisable shapes:
A local institution over time.: A school, hospital, newspaper, port, or firm whose records you can actually reach. The archive is nearby, the scope is naturally bounded, and almost nobody has written it up.
A contested episode.: A strike, election, trial, siege, or scandal where historians (or contemporaries) disagreed about what happened or why — the disagreement hands you your argument.
An under-studied figure.: Not another paper on the famous name, but the deputy, rival, or regional counterpart whose papers survive and whose role complicates the standard story.
A policy decision and its consequences.: One law, treaty clause, or administrative choice, traced from the debate that produced it to what it actually did. Naturally argumentative, naturally evidenced.
A micro-history that opens outward.: One building, ship, object, or street used as a lens on a larger transformation. Hardest to pull off, most memorable when it works.
The test for any candidate topic is brutal and simple: can you name, today, three primary sources you could realistically get your hands on? If not, the topic is a wish, not a project.
Start With a One-Page Prospectus
Before the research phase, write a single page that answers four questions. This document is the cheapest insurance in the whole project — it exposes a doomed topic in week six rather than month six.
The question.: One sentence, phrased as a genuine question a historian could dispute.
The provisional answer.: Your best current guess at the thesis. It will change; it must exist.
The sources.: The three-plus primary sources you can access, and the key secondary works you already know exist.
The stakes.: One paragraph on why the answer matters — what larger understanding changes if you are right.
Show this page to a teacher or mentor before writing anything longer. Every serious problem a supervisor catches at the prospectus stage costs a conversation; the same problem caught in a full draft costs a rewrite.
Finding the Historiography Without a University Library
"Engage with the historiography" sounds impossible from a school library. It is not — the workflow is mechanical:
Start with book reviews, not books.: Reviews in academic journals summarise a book's argument and its critics in two pages. Reading five reviews teaches you the shape of a debate faster than reading one monograph.
Use Google Scholar's citation trails.: Find one relevant article, then follow both directions: what it cites, and who has cited it since. Two hops usually maps the field.
JSTOR offers individual access.: Many articles are readable through its free personal account tier, and many school systems have institutional access students never use.
Mine bibliographies.: The bibliography of the most recent serious work on your topic is a pre-built reading list assembled by an expert.
Record disagreements as you read.: Keep a running file of "Historian A says X; Historian B says Y" pairs. Your paper's argument will live inside one of those pairs.
Where Students Actually Find Primary Sources
More is digitised than most students believe. Depending on your topic and region, the reliable starting points include the Library of Congress digital collections and Chronicling America for US newspapers, the UK National Archives and the British Newspaper Archive, HathiTrust and the Internet Archive for out-of-copyright books and documents, Trove for Australian material, and Gallica for French sources. Most national libraries now run an equivalent, and many local archives will scan specific documents if a student writes a polite, specific request — archivists are, as a profession, remarkably generous to serious young researchers.
Two workflow rules from the start: capture the full citation details of everything the moment you open it, and use a reference manager — Zotero is free and exports Chicago-style notes — so month eleven is formatting, not archaeology.
How the Deadlines Actually Work
The Review publishes quarterly — issues appear in September, December, March, and June — and takes submissions on a rolling basis against four dates:
August 1: for the winter issue
November 1: for the spring issue
February 1: for the summer issue
May 1: for the fall issue
The mechanic most people miss: each submission is considered for the next three issues, not just the next one. Strategically, that means there is no single make-or-break date. Submit when the paper is genuinely finished, not when the nearest deadline lands — a rushed submission burns your one chance with that paper.
A Realistic 12-Month Plan
This is the working rhythm we use with our own students, starting in late August and targeting a submission the following summer:
Months 1–2: Topic and question.: Read widely, then narrow ruthlessly until you have a question one paper can actually answer. Draft a one-page prospectus.
Month 3: Historiography.: Map who has written on your question and where they disagree. Your argument will live inside that disagreement.
Months 4–5: Research.: Primary sources first, secondary around them. Keep full citation details from day one — reconstructing them in month ten is misery.
Month 6: Architecture.: An outline down to the paragraph level, with the evidence assigned to each section before drafting begins.
Months 7–8: The first draft.: Written in sections, not in one heroic push. Expect it to be too long and partly wrong; that is what drafts are for.
Months 9–10: Structural revision.: Fix the argument before the prose — cut sections that do not serve the thesis, and strengthen the joints where evidence is thin.
Month 11: Style and apparatus.: Sentence-level editing, then a full pass on endnotes and bibliography.
Month 12: Final checks and submission.: Formatting, a cold read after a week away from the paper, then submit against whichever quarterly date comes next.
A Short Turabian Endnote Primer
The Review expects the apparatus of historical scholarship, which in practice means Turabian (Chicago) style endnotes — numbered notes at the end of the paper, plus a bibliography. Footnotes at the bottom of pages are not the convention here; endnotes are.
The four citation shapes that cover most of a history paper:
A book:: Author first name last name, Title in italics (City: Publisher, year), page.
A journal article:: Author, "Article Title," Journal Name volume, issue (year): page.
A newspaper:: Author, "Headline," Newspaper Name, date of publication.
An archival or primary source:: Description of the document, date, collection name, archive, location.
Two refinements that mark a properly-formatted paper: after a source's first full note, later references use the shortened form — author surname, abbreviated title, page — rather than repeating everything; and the bibliography entry for the same source is formatted differently from the note (surname first, full stops instead of commas, no page reference). Turabian's manual documents both patterns, and getting them right signals to readers that you have handled scholarly apparatus before.
Two habits will save you: first, write the endnote the moment you use the source, never later; second, keep the bibliography as a separate running file from week one. Students lose entire weekends to reverse-engineering citations they did not record.
Working With a Supervisor
The Review requires sole authorship — the research, argument, and prose must be yours — but sole authorship does not mean working alone. Every serious historian has readers, and a year-long project needs at least one adult who reads drafts and asks hard questions. What a good supervisor does, and what you should ask for:
Interrogates the prospectus: before you sink months into a weak question.
Checks scope at each stage: — the most common intervention is "narrower."
Reads for argument first: , prose second: does each section actually support the thesis?
Holds the schedule.: The difference between finished and abandoned is usually calendar discipline, not talent.
Never writes a sentence for you.: Feedback and questions, yes; text, no. That line protects both your integrity and your eligibility.
Ambitious students sometimes pair the year-long paper with a shorter autumn competition to keep momentum — our guide to the HIR Academic Writing Contest covers the natural companion piece, an 800–1,200 word article due in early January.
What Publication Is Worth — Honestly
The Review itself puts it carefully: students may note on university applications that they have submitted a paper, because many admissions officers know the journal and understand what a serious submission represents. Publication, when it happens, is a rare and recognised distinction.
But build your reasoning on the guaranteed outcome, not the 5% one. A student who finishes a genuine 8,000-word research paper has learned to frame a question, work with sources, sustain an argument, and manage a year-long project — before university. That is the asset. Publication is the upside.
The Mistakes That Sink Submissions
- A topic too broad to exhaust in 8,000 words
- Narrative without argument — chronology is not a thesis
- No engagement with what historians have already said
- Secondary sources only, with no primary material anywhere
- Citation apparatus assembled in a panic during the final week
- Submitting an expanded school essay rather than a purpose-built paper
- Rushing to hit the nearest deadline instead of the next one
How We Can Help
The working documents behind this guide are free in our resource library: the one-page prospectus template and 12-month planner, the Turabian citation cheat sheet covering all ten source types above, and the primary source archives directory with search tips for each collection.
Atlantic Ivy runs a year-long Concord Review program: a weekly Sunday seminar plus unlimited personal supervision between sessions, following the twelve-month plan above from topic selection through submission. We are honest about what we guarantee — the finished, publication-quality paper and the research skills, with publication as the upside; no one can promise a 5% journal. Details and enrollment are on our Concord Review program page, and you can see how our students have performed across writing competitions on our results page.