Finding research articles
Until recently, the best way to locate research articles was to search databases that indexed scholarly literature, for example Web of Knowledge. This is still the most effective systematic approach to gathering articles on a topic & enables you to search regardless of journal publisher & when you only have a broad subject or some keywords to begin with.
From a researcher's perspective the success of searching literature indexing databases often depends on the immediate availability of full text & this in turn depends on whether the Library had a subscription to the journals which are indexed in the relevant database. The Library customises databases to indicate full text availability to researchers.
As more articles have become available on an open access basis in either fully or partially open access journals & scholarly repositories, you can now search these in addition to literature indexing databases. To avoid searching individual sources, this is best done by the following routes: