• What scholarly conversations are relevant to your topic?
• What are the "layers" of your topic? Where would you locate your topic in the bigger picture?
• What case study or studies will you use? What primary sources will help you tell this story?

Secondary sources help to situate your thesis in the framework of larger scholarly conversations. Identify scholars whose work you will engage with early on in your research process.

As you search through library catalogs and databases, take note (literally, make lists) of the keywords and terms that you find useful, as well as the Library of Congress Subject Headings associated with your topic. The subject headings will be the same in other library catalogs and databases, and that language provides crucial keyword searching terms.

When you are searching in library catalogs for book length studies about your topic, remember to search broader than your topic as well as in narrower related sub-topics. Many book-length secondary sources will not require reading in entirety. Use tables of contents and indexes effectively to identify crucial chapters and passages. 

Peruse the bibliographies and footnotes in your secondary sources; this will help you find additional relevant secondary sources and may direct you to primary sources in archives, published sourcebooks, databases of primary source collections, and elsewhere. Also take note of dates/events, organization names, personal names, names of particular policies, laws or initiatives etc.; all of these are potential keywords for finding primary sources.

Research tip: Visualize your topic. Make a grid and label the top row (headings) with what you consider to be the BIG subtopics of your topic. In each column, brainstorm relevant synonyms, people's names, organizations, concepts, ideas, places. Looking at this layout can sometimes reveal possibilities for a thread that runs across the columns, or a different way of organizing what the main ideas are. This grid will change and evolve as you do your research.

The BEAM model provides a framework for identifying how you might use a source in your own research.