Author’s Research – before or after the first draft of your manuscript?

I recently finished the first draft of my next novel, provisionally titled The Disease. For my previous two published novels, I did a great deal of the research before I started to write. In the case of Secrets From The Dust, I travelled to and lived in Australia for 6 months. For both those first two novels, I have folders thick with research material, megabytes of computer files and links to many websites, collected over years.

Part of the problem when an author has done a lot of research be...