At the beginning of your research, you will want to explore resources that help you fully understand your broad topic and identify ways to narrow your topic into a good research question. Strategic exploration involves searching the internet, books, and research starter databases for background information on your topic. You can be strategic by carefully selecting websites and library resources that are reliable and provide helpful overviews of your topic, then following links and performing new searches for terms that you have been introduced to or ideas that you hadn't thought of before.
View this video to understand more about strategic exploration.
Research Starters can be used to start strategic exploration of your topic. They are databases that include a wide variety of articles to give you a broad overview of your topic and help you understand the many different aspects of your topic. To strategically explore your topic - rather than just search haphazardly for your topic terms - you need to select an appropriate Research Starter database that will be most likely to address your topic.
For example, a research question about the effects of the internet could be strategically explored in a database about social issues OR technology, depending on what you are most interested in.