Can You Publish Your IB Extended Essay? A Guide for 2027 Students

For most IB students, the Extended Essay (EE) is the longest piece of independent research they will write at school: a question you chose yourself, up to 4,000 words, and months of reading and analysis with a supervisor. Once it is marked, a natural question follows: can it be published?

The short answer is yes, with conditions. The IB does not stop students publishing their own Extended Essays, but you need to respect its academic integrity rules, your school's process, and the standards of the journal you send it to. This guide covers what the rules say, what the new EE guide changes, and how to develop an economics or business management EE into a paper worth submitting.

Are You Allowed to Publish Your IB Extended Essay?

Yes. Under the IB's Diploma Programme Assessment procedures, students keep the copyright in work they submit for assessment. Submitting it grants the IB a non-exclusive licence to use the work, including for educational and promotional purposes - and because the licence is non-exclusive, it does not prevent you from publishing the essay elsewhere.

Owning your work does not mean every journal will accept it, though. Before publishing, check three things:

• School approval: ask your EE supervisor or IB coordinator about timing and any restrictions your school sets.
• Academic integrity: the work must be your own, with every source, dataset and contribution properly acknowledged.
• Journal requirements: some journals accept adapted school research, while others restrict work that has already appeared or overlaps substantially with it.

Timing matters most. The Extended Essay guide requires every essay to be authenticated by the student and supervisor before it is uploaded for assessment, and once that happens you cannot withdraw it to make changes. Supervisors can check authenticity by comparing your final essay with your drafts, checking your references, or using plagiarism-detection software. The safest order is to finish your school's and the IB's submission process first, and only then post the essay publicly or send a version to a journal. If your EE has not been submitted yet, talk to your supervisor before sharing it anywhere.

What Does the New 2027 Extended Essay Guide Say?

The IB published a revised Extended Essay guide in February 2025 for students first assessed in May 2027. The essay is still a piece of independent research of up to 4,000 words - about 40 hours of your own work, supported by a recommended three to five hours of supervision. Under the new guide:

• Two pathways: a subject-focused essay grounded in one DP subject, or an interdisciplinary essay that integrates knowledge, concepts, theories, perspectives or methods from two DP subjects. Environmental systems and societies and literature and performance can only be used on the subject-focused pathway.
• A separate reflective statement of up to 500 words on the reflection and progress form (RPF), written after three mandatory reflection sessions - the last of which is the viva voce, a closing interview with your supervisor.
• Five assessment criteria worth 30 marks in total, with reflection (criterion E) marked from the RPF only.

These criteria reward many of the skills academic journals value: a suitable method, a logical line of argument and critical evaluation. But a high-scoring EE is not automatically a publication-ready paper. The IB marks how well you meet its criteria; a journal asks whether your manuscript adds something to its field. The IB summarises the changes on its Extended Essay updates page.

Can You Reuse Your EE Research in a Journal Paper?

You can develop your EE research into a journal manuscript, but keep publication separate from reuse inside the Diploma Programme. The guide is explicit about the second: none of your content from one DP assessment can be duplicated in another, so an EE and an internal assessment (IA) on related topics need substantially different angles. The IB calls this "double-dipping", and it is treated as academic misconduct.

The guide does not set the same rule for adapting an EE into a later journal submission. For publication, what matters is transparency and originality. If your manuscript develops research first done for your EE, you should:

• Disclose that the manuscript began as an Extended Essay when the journal asks.
• Say whether the EE has already appeared anywhere publicly.
• Identify clearly what is new: the additional research, analysis or conclusions.
• Check the journal's rules on overlapping material and prior publication.
• Get permission to reuse any third-party figures, images or restricted data.

For example, The Hinksey Review's research principles state that prior publication does not automatically disqualify a submission, but authors must disclose whether the work, or a substantially similar version of it, has already appeared elsewhere - including in a school journal, online platform or competition.

Submitting work for IB assessment is not the same as publishing it. Still, describe its history accurately whenever a journal asks.

How Do You Turn an Economics or Business EE Into a Research Paper?

For many students the real question is not whether publication is allowed but whether the research is strong enough to take further. An EE investigates a focused academic question; a journal article also has to give readers a meaningful contribution. Here are three ways to extend an economics or business management EE.

Expand the Dataset

Imagine your economics EE asked: to what extent have minimum wage increases affected employment in a particular city? It might have examined several years of local labour-market data. To develop it into a paper, you could extend the time period, compare similar cities or introduce additional variables - testing whether your original conclusion holds under different economic conditions.

Introduce a Comparative Analysis

Suppose your business management EE examined how one clothing company's sustainability strategy shaped consumer perceptions. You could compare several brands, analyse differences in pricing or positioning, or collect new consumer responses. Instead of assessing one company's approach, you would be asking whether a wider pattern exists.

Test a New Relationship

An EE might have explored how social media advertising affects brand awareness. A follow-up study could ask whether perceived authenticity is associated with purchase intention, using a carefully designed survey and appropriate analysis. That takes the original topic in a more specific direction and generates new evidence.

These are hypothetical examples. Any extension still needs a sound method and an honest account of its limitations - more data or more complexity does not automatically make research better. For a practical breakdown of methods, see our guide to doing business research in high school.

If you want help taking an economics or business EE further once it has been submitted, Research Scholars is a 12-week mentored programme in which each student writes a full business research paper on a real organisation's challenge, with publication opportunities for outstanding students at their mentor's discretion. For a shorter start, Research Fundamentals is a four-week programme that ends in a foundational research paper you can build on later.

What Needs to Change Before You Submit Your EE to a Journal?

A new title and a reformatted document do not make an Extended Essay publication-ready. The changes specific to an EE are:

• Length: the EE stops at 4,000 words, but many journals expect more. The Hinksey Review, for example, asks for research articles of 4,000-6,000 words, excluding the abstract, references, tables, figures and appendices.
• Structure: add what the EE did not require of you - an abstract, a literature review that positions your question, a method a reader could follow, and a discussion of limitations.
• EE-only material: remove the reflection, references to assessment criteria or your supervisor, and anything written for an examiner rather than a reader.
• Contribution: state plainly what a reader learns from your paper that they would not learn from your sources.
• Documentation: recheck citations, data permissions, consent from any survey participants, and the journal's originality and AI-use policies.

The rest of the process - choosing the right journal, sharpening the question, handling reviewers' feedback - is covered step by step in How to Get Your Research Published in High School.

Where Can You Publish an IB Extended Essay?

The right venue depends on your subject, your method and how original the work is. Some student research journals take economics, business and social science papers; others are limited to particular disciplines or types of research.

One option for an extended economics or business EE is The Hinksey Review, a peer-reviewed journal of applied research that considers work from upper secondary school students, undergraduates and independent researchers under 25. It looks for a genuine contribution - new analysis, evidence, applications or interpretations - and does not publish literature reviews or textbook summaries. An adapted EE can be a starting point, but acceptance depends on meeting the journal's standards.

For a side-by-side look at thirteen journals and preprint servers, with their subjects, authorship rules and fees, see Where Can High School Students Publish Research?.

Can You Enter Your EE in an Essay Competition?

Rarely as it stands. Most essay competitions set their own questions and word limits, so an EE becomes the research behind a new entry rather than the entry itself. The Hinksey Business Essay Competition, for example, asks for an individual 1,000-1,500 word case-study essay on one organisation and a change it faces. Competitions open to international students, with their dates and rules, are collected in our guide to business and economics competitions for high school students.

Should You Publish Your EE Before College Applications?

Publication can be a meaningful outcome of a research project, and you don't have to wait for it: if your Extended Essay involved substantial research, you can describe it in your application whether or not it has been published - the research question, the method, what you found and what you personally contributed.

For most IB students the calendar decides the question anyway. The EE is usually finished and submitted during the final year of the Diploma Programme, close to or after application deadlines, and peer review can take months. If you have sent a manuscript to a journal, describe its status precisely - submitted, under review, accepted or published - and never list a submission as a publication.

The priority is credible research you can explain; publication can follow when the work is ready. How admissions offices actually weigh student research is covered in Do Colleges Care About High School Research?.

Is Your Extended Essay Ready for a Journal? A Final Checklist

• Your EE has been authenticated and submitted to the IB through your school.
• Your supervisor or IB coordinator has confirmed any school restrictions on publishing it.
• You have read the journal's rules on prior publication and overlap, and you will disclose that the paper began as an EE.
• The manuscript adds something the EE did not: more data, a comparison or a new question.
• The reflection and other EE-only material are gone, and the paper follows the journal's format.
• Permissions for third-party data and figures, and consent from any participants, are in place.
• Any AI assistance is disclosed as the journal requires.

The Takeaway

You can publish work that began as your IB Extended Essay, but completing an EE and producing a publishable paper are two different achievements. The EE gives you the foundation - a research question, evidence, analysis and practice in academic writing. Publication means taking it further, through a stronger method, more data, a new comparison or a more developed argument. For students in economics or business management, the EE can be the start of a larger research project rather than its end.

Want to build a business research paper from the start with an Ivy League or Oxbridge mentor? Explore Research Scholars

Extended your economics or business EE into original research? See what The Hinksey Review asks for before you submit: Read the submission guidelines