Texts: First identify the material documents you are interpreting. It may be a single work like Moby Dick, or an author like Alexander Pope, or a period such as Victorian literature, or a genre such as the Bildungsroman. Whatever it is, identify what you're trying to interpret in your research project.

Topic: Next identify the concepts or aspects of your texts that you are focusing on. It may be a formal term such as metaphor, or a theme such as ambition, or an aspect such as sources.

Synonyms for Searching: For both your text and your topic, brainstorm synonyms that may generate results when you search for these terms.

Public Resources: Begin with some public resources, just to get a sense of what the conversation about your text and topic is and what some of your sources might be. Create a working bibliography and populate it with sources as you encounter them. At this stage, you’re simply trying to familiarize yourself with a discourse and to see if there are any obvious studies or scholars that are a big part of it.

Google: Start with a simple Google search. Enter your search terms and see if they produce any obvious sources that you should note down in your working bibliography.

Wikipedia: Search around in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic papers, but its entries do often list reliable academic sources, which is what you're after.

Google Books: Search for your terms in Google Books. The nice thing about Google books is that it's searching books, and so your results are more likely to be peer-reviewed academic sources than when you do a general Google search.

Google Scholar: Search for your terms in Google Scholar. Beware that Google Scholar collects all scholarship in all areas, so you may have a lot of irrelevant results to weed through – e.g., a search for “Shakespeare” is going to generate results related to Tom Shakespeare, a disability studies scholar.

Academic Resources: Now that you've gotten a sense of what the conversation about your text and topic might be, turn to the academic resources made available to you through your university’s library. Because these resources are often limited to Literary Studies, they will provide more relevant results, but they will also provide a lot of results, and not all of them will be important for your research project.

A Reference Work: The best place to get an authoritative description of a topic and a list of relevant sources is to go to the resources variously called encyclopedias, handbooks, or companions – something like The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. These resources usually include short entries written by experts on a topic and a list of key sources on that topic. Mine the references, and add them to your working bibliography. For literary terms and traditions, the best resource is probably still The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. On theory and criticism, see The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. In all of these resources, note references in the bibliographies you'll need to seek out and study for yourself.

Oxford Bibliographies: Another good place to find some tried and true scholarship is in Oxford Bibliographies. See, especially, the entries collected under the subject headings “American Literature” and “British and Irish Literature.” The bibliographies are organized by topic, so scroll through them to see if there are any relevant sources to add to your bibliography.

Cambridge Companions: The Cambridge Companions series provides longer (chapter-length) discussions of all sorts of topics relevant to all sorts of literature. The series is published in several different books, so skim through the tables of contents to see which chapters are relevant to your research project. The series is written by academic experts but geared toward advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Search the collection for specific texts, specific authors, historical periods, and themes. Most Cambridge Companions will outline the historical context of an issue, articulate its thematic concerns, and distill its critical reception. The end of each chapter includes a list of references and (usually) suggestions for further reading, especially references you'll want to seek out to study for yourself. Add the relevant materials to your working bibliography.

MLA International Bibliography: The MLA International Bibliography is the Modern Language Association’s database for literary studies scholarship. It is the best and most popular database for research on literature. First get a sense of how much has been written about the writer and the text you're analyzing by searching for them in the "Subject Author" and the "Subject Work" fields; if there are there three articles about your text, your paper will be able to account for the entire critical tradition, but if there are 500 articles on your text you'll need to narrow your critical community to writers who have addressed a specific them in your text. Thus combine "Subject Author" and "Subject Field" searches with "Keyword" (more results) and "Descriptors" (fewer results) searches. Mark all the records that apply, even if you know you can't cover them all, since you'll narrow your scope later.

LION: Literature Online (LION) is a massive database that has full texts of literary works, of journals of literary criticism, and of reference works for literary studies. Repeat your searches here.

JSTOR and Muse: Repeat these same searches in JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/) and Project Muse (http://muse.jhu.edu/), two databases specializing in scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. You will probably duplicate many results from your MLA Bibliography search, but add any new articles to your list of Modern Criticism.

The Library Catalog: Repeat your searches in your library’s catalog. Look up sources you’ve already discovered, and note the subject headings used in the library’s record. Use those subject headings to modify your search terms.

Annotated Bibliographies: While you’re searching the library’s catalog, check for annotated bibliographies related to your texts and topics. 

The Library Stacks: Go to the call numbers in the library stacks where books on your subject are located and scan through the nearby shelves. There may be some additional sources that, for whatever reason, eluded your electronic searches.