Community
Community guidelines
ResearchForge works because students give each other honest, useful feedback and treat each other's work with care. That's the whole thing. Everything below follows from it.
Feedback is a gift — give it well
- Be specific. "Your control group doesn't account for temperature" helps; "this is bad" doesn't.
- Critique the work, never the person. Everyone here is learning.
- Say what's working, not only what isn't. People act on feedback they can hear.
- If you don't know, say you don't know. Confident wrong answers cost someone weeks.
Respect other people's work
- Don't share someone's private project, data, or writing outside the access they gave you.
- Peer-review access is temporary and scoped on purpose. Don't screenshot your way around it.
- Don't copy another student's project. Study past projects for structure and method, not content.
- Cite your sources — in your project and in your posts.
Do your own research
- Ask for help with understanding. Don't ask someone to design your experiment for you.
- AI feedback is a tool, not a co-author. The reasoning has to be yours.
- Never present AI-generated text, data, or analysis as your own work — most fairs treat that as a disqualifying integrity violation.
- If a judge asks how something works, you should be able to answer without notes.
Keep each other safe
- Don't post personal information — yours or anyone else's. That includes school names alongside photos, and participant data.
- Never post advice that would have someone skip a required approval or safety step.
- Report content that's harassing, dangerous, or plagiarised. Moderators review reports on public content.
- If a project sounds genuinely unsafe, say so plainly and point them to their adult sponsor.
What moderators can and cannot do
Moderators keep public spaces safe. They can remove or lock posts and comments, act on reports, verify resources, and maintain the winning-project archive.
They cannot read your private project, your notebook, your files, your data, your personal notes, or your AI reviews. That isn't a policy promise — the database itself has no rule that would let them. Your project is yours.
Questions about a moderation decision? Ask on General Discussion.