Step 1: Your topic you have identified this in your prospectus

Step 2: Break it out conceptually – what are the major threads in your question; what is essential

Step 3: Background research - be sure to understand your concepts;  look at the reference resources page at librar.wustl.edu for help

Step 4: Get a citation manager, with it you can:

• Keep your citation organized
• Take notes for you annotations
• Quickly produce the bibliography in MLA – you will need to paste in your annotations

Step 5:  Use your background research to generate terms

Step 6: Play with you terms in keyword searches: see the Find Articles page in this guide or try Primo from Libraries homepage or Google Scholar)

Step 7: Determine if it’s a good hit

• Where did it come from? Scholarly Journal?
• Did a person author it?
• Does it have a bibliography?
• Is it more than five pages?

Step 8: Use good hits to build further

• Use the bibliography
• Use the subject terms
• Use the abstract