There are four main ways that I do research, and a lot of these are the same ways that students do research too. I will read other books on the topic. I will also read scientific articles and magazine articles. I will use the internet, although very carefully, because you don’t really know what you’re going to get. You can’t always trust it. You always have to verify it. I go out and make observations, and so that can be near my home or it can be when I travel to various parts of the world.
And then the last way that I get information is by talking to experts. And this is critical, especially when you’re writing science, because science is changing all the time. There are new discoveries every day. And to get the most specific new, exciting discoveries, scientists are on the ground doing the work. And they can really help you not only to talk to you about the topics that you’re writing about and their expertise in that area, but also to help you understand what has happened in that maybe three-ish year period of time between when scientists are publishing their papers, their academic papers, and what they’re actually doing right now. And so that allows me to have kind of up to the minute information in my books.