The study, conducted between 2013 and 2017, aimed to find if there is room for the construction of authorship in research conducted by students from public, university or private schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 students from 6th to 9th grade, 15 teachers of different subjects, and 5 school professionals - 3 librarians, 1 computer teacher and 1 reading-room agent. Our aim was to understand how student research is understood, proposed, and conducted, in order to verify if students find room to be authors in their own school research. Based on critical thinking, Pedro Demo s writings on school research, and on Mikhail Bakhtin s dialogic theory of learning, we have analyzed the answers to the interviews and found that: a) yes, there is room for creative work directed to students interests; b) authorship is happening; c) there is concern by the teachers with investing in authorship and fighting plagiarism; d) teachers claim that their academic education did not prepare them to teach students on how to do research; e) scientific texts are seldom worked with; f) there is a conflict between what students see as their questions and what teachers actually want them to talk about; g) student research is seen as a necessary training, even though schools are still shy in teaching how to do research, to select sources and to use them in a cohesive manner. In sum, we understand that, even though there is authorship and creative thinking in student school research, there is little room for a more detailed and critical work with such skill. Also, there is little work with the scientific text genre. We would like to emphasize the need for a deep debate in academic teacher training on how to do research in school in such a way that it is cohesive, ethical, and that it promotes authorship and defeats plagiarism.