I'm expanding on this question "Confused About Today's Assignment"  . I used Gone Girl as an example there.

Here are a few others: Gone with the Wind - this novel is full of historical information about the civil war, first published in 1936. So Margaret Mitchell had to research everything about Sherman's march and how the South lost the war so she could weave it in around Scarlett's life. There would be other things, too, like how small a lady's waist ought to be as a Southern Belle, and how to deliver babies in that time, and what doctors did that is different from now.

False Memory by Dean Koontz - while this novel might be speculative, the major premise is a psychiatrist who messes around in people's heads. Our main character is given a fear of herself. Her best friend showed symptoms of agoraphobia, but we learned the psychiatrist was behind it early. The psychiatrist also had a penchant for murmuring haiku to himself. Definitions include how to write haiku, what sorts of phobias might be intriguing and unusual for the doctor to give to the characters, and the effects of the hypnotic suggestions that he supposedly gave them to implement these designs.

Jurassic Park hits the science fiction side if you only look at the dinosaur aspect - but we also want to know where the DNA came from, why it needed to be mixed with frog DNA to have catastrophic consequences, and what the current limitations for technology were in the security field. This puts very real late-20th-century technology to the test, even though the novel is speculative.

Luna by Julie Ann Peters is a YA contemporary book exploring one girl's life as her brother becomes her sister. This one requires a lot of research to understand what it is like to be born the wrong gender, even if the reader only sees the struggle from the outside. The brother talks about all the things he will do when he becomes who he is supposed to be - shaving the adam's apple is one I remember. But there are smaller things, where the brother acts like the boy for his family, and when he finally lets his true self out, they notice. So the fake personality he showed the world in the beginning is one part, and the true personality she showed at the end is another part. Yes, this is a cross-over with character, but some characters are very high-maintenance this way.

So when you think about those novels that you have cooked up, where are the specialized knowledge bits? Do you have spies with cool gadgets? Do you have youngsters researching arcane topics? Do you have an old mentor who has all the knowledge but imparts it one piece at a time? These are all the things that go into your definitions - anything that you need to have at your fingertips during the writing. Because none of us should have to spend all day on the internet during November looking for a piece of information.