 Hi everyone, Erica again. So I'm gonna introduce you to two ways that I like to begin my research. Obviously, there are many potential ways that you could start a research project, and you should ultimately choose the one that works best for you. But I find that this early phase of research, this getting started phase, can be a little bit tough. So I'm gonna tell you how I usually approach this. So the goal for me when starting a research project is to first learn where the information is on my topic. Who's writing about it? Who's publishing it? Things like that. And some of the best ways that you can do this is kind of research in two different categories. One is to research broadly, and the other is to research with what you already know or what you're already used to interacting with for information. First, the research broadly category. So this includes information that's contained in like encyclopedias or dictionaries. Janks Library has some great online resources for you in this encyclopedia category that can help get you started. And what you want to pay attention to in particular with these sources is not just what information is it trying to communicate to you, but also do they have any suggestions for potentially further readings that you can go follow up on. Encyclopedias can be a particularly good suggestions for maybe potential books out there on your topic area of interest. And then the second category that I usually begin with is to start with what I know, and what exactly do I mean by this? Well, oftentimes we as researchers or maybe even leaders are interested in reading. We often read a lot of different things. Maybe you have magazines or journals that you're already used to seeing come across your desk from your member organizations that your school subscribes to, or maybe you have an extensive reading list that was suggested to you by friends and colleagues that you need to get to. These are great resources to begin with since it's stuff that you're already used to interacting with and reading about. So let me show you an example of what I mean by that. So I have with me the magazine Educational Leadership, a great magazine that's produced by the organization ASCD. Now this resource is not a peer-reviewed resource in the same way that we might think of say like a Scarlet article or a peer-reviewed article, but the articles inside are great resources because they are often short and succinct information about a particular area of interest that's being discussed currently in the literature. So the biggest benefit of something like this is that I can read them quickly. But what am I really looking for when I'm reading through some of these articles? Connections to other information that I can use in my research. So as I read through things that I'm already in the habit of reading, I keep an eye out for phrases such as according to the research or such and such an author states. And as I skim through these articles, so for example, this one Learning to Listen, which is all about making the case for listening as leaders, I'm both reading the article for its content, but I'm also skimming it to see if there's any references or mentions of those types of places where it might say a research done or study that has been done. So as I skim through, I find this one here, a study from the University of California Berkeley found that schools with a high level of integrity, blah, blah, blah, and then it even gives me the citation information there. So I have a little bit of a clue that there's actually going to be a reference list at the end of this article that we can go look at. So this kind of information right here in an article like this is gold, because I know that this was an actual research study that has been done about a topic area of interest, and I can actually go and look that up to do some more in-depth research about this topic that already piqued my interest from a short article published in Educational Leadership. So because I saw the citation information in this particular article, I'm guessing that there's probably a reference list at the end of this, and I'm right. So there's the little short reference list right there. Not all articles in magazines like this have this. Sometimes you get lucky, but you can still use the same kind of information to track this down. So in this case, we have the citation, and you'll actually watch a video later on in this module that it will teach you how you can actually find articles from citations like this using our Jank's Library resources. But for now, as you read through stuff that you're already accustomed to seeing come across your desk, pay attention to those reference lists and start making a list of information you want to follow up on. Thank you.