When I finish a book or a long article, I often create a new document, adding notes and quotations from what I have read and doing my best to summarize what I have read. Although my skills in this area leave much to be desired, “How to Read Articles” is a good introduction to research evaluation. After I have narrowed down the keywords and finally found the major articles or authors cited by everyone on the topic, I usually try to find reviews on the field. Since one book can reference dozens or even hundreds of other books, this can easily lead to an exponentially growing list of references. In the case of textbooks, I often find it helpful to write a search query on Amazon and then narrow the search to textbooks. I’m certainly no research expert, but I thought I’d share how I did it to clarify my own thoughts and help those who want to know how to satisfy their curiosity but aren’t sure how to get started. I ended up including entire chapters in my book because the research results were too good to leave as footnotes. When I see the same work, book, or author published multiple times, I download the article, even if it has nothing to do with my original research. But I don’t slavishly adhere to them-sometimes they appear as a rich vein of research that answers questions I wasn’t even aware of. Textbooks are more suited to broader topics, review articles to more specific topics, although there is some overlap. Whether you should start with review articles or textbooks depends on the scope of the question you want to ask. After all, if you can’t find and understand the arguments of others, you will settle for what your intuition tells you or the opinion of one person who caught your attention. If you want to know what experts think about discipline, you will quickly discover that there is a difference between self-control, self-regulation, mindfulness, and perseverance. In my opinion, it’s not about having all the facts and details in your head, it’s about having a good map of the area so you know where to look when you want to find it. Do you do research in your work? What strategies and steps would you add to it? I’d like to learn more about it, especially to enhance my own learning. I’ve already written short research essays on the relationship between research and exploitation, how aging affects learning, and the effectiveness of speed-reading.