First, please understand that publishing a research paper is not an easy task (at least at reputable venues). I'm writing this mainly because lot of undergrads

First, please understand that publishing a research paper is not an easy task (at least at reputable venues). I'm writing this mainly because lot of undergrads have this feeling that they are someone special endowed with some magical capacity to envision beautiful ideas that no one else has thought about. Many of them tend to think that they don't need to study prior art, do advanced studies or be upto date with any recent works. It seems to me that some of this thinking in young students have developed thanks to constant onslaught of movies like Harry Potter, Lord of the Ring or even Star Wars where main character is great just because they were born that way and they don't need to put in any work to get there. They are just destined to be great. They are the chosen ones to crack the hardest problems and save the world :). This is then further re-enforced by stories of Faraday and Edison who did not had PhDs and ended up doing great discoveries. The world has changed big time since then! Typically these days to publish research paper at reputable venue requires lot of work. Count in 10-12 hour per day for 3-6 months per paper + lot of luck + competatnt collaborator(s). You will most definitely need to be intimately familiar with everything that has been going on in the field. Design experiments to prove how you compare to others. If you are doing research, you won't have time for anything else. It's a full time job, not a weekend hobby. If you don't know what were the major paper came out during last 3 months then it means you are not quite ready. If you can't name the 20 people who have published significant work during last 20 years in your field then you are quite possibly not ready. If you haven't been reading at least 1 paper a week (or if you are reading but have no clue what's going on) then you have quite some way to go. So to summarize, being a researcher is a full time job of reading research papers with some occasional bouts of writing your own papers. In today's complexity levels, it would be very hard to do significant novel work without any collaborations at all (ala Einstein 1905). More importantly you need other eyes to enhance content and/or fix issues. The best way for undergrads to write papers is to get enrolled in Masters and then to PhD. There is almost no escape from this requirement and people who tend to think that there is another way would usually tend to regret it if research is what they really wanted to do all along.