The default search for UC Library Search is to look through all of the databases included in the resource, which includes the UC-wide library catalog, hundreds of databases, special collections, archives, media, and many other types of information.
You will be able to access the full text content that the Library pays for if you sign in with your Calnet credentials.
To limit your search results to articles, one option is to choose to show only Peer-reviewed journals. You can also select from a list of Resource Types.
Google Scholar is an easy way to do interdisciplinary research, and with some settings changes can become even more useful. You need a Google account to use these features.
Do your search in Google Scholar. Look in the left sidebar for the Create Alert link next to the envelope icon, and click it. New items will be sent to your email account as they are found by Google.
Open Scholar. Click on the menu icon 
in the upper left corner and then the gear icon
to reach the settings page. On the next screen, choose Library Links from the left-hand menu. In the search box, type the word Berkeley. Choose University of California, Berkeley - Get it at UC, and Open Worldcat Search.
Do a Google Scholar search. Click on the "Cited by" link under a citation and select the "Search within articles citing..." checkbox.
Once you've searched an index to find articles, you may need to use Get it at UC 
to link to a PDF or html file if the full text is not immediately available. Each database is a bit different, but a good rule of thumb is:
There are a number of databases that index History journals, dissertations, books, conference proceedings, and other papers. Many of these are specific to a region (such as the Bibliography of British and Irish History), a time period (ITER: Gateway to the Renaissance), or a topic (such as History of Science, Technology, and Medicine). The regional history guides linked from this guide's Home tab provide links to relevant article databases. You can also access the A-Z Databases list and use the drop down boxes at the top of the list to limit to Subject - History and Database Type - Articles.
Some useful interdisciplinary databases include:
Created by Bielefeld University Library, BASE is an excellent resource for finding academic web resources. The search tool provides more than 300 million documents from more than 11,000 content providers. About 60% of the content is freely available (Open Access).
Unlike Google Scholar, BASE allows you to search just the metadata of documents, not the full text of the resources indexed.
The Basic search provides a single search field and will search all of metadata by default. On the search results page, there are facets that allow you to limit your search results (for example, subject, language, year of publication).
The Advance search allows you to specify which metadata fields you want to search (for example, author, title, doi) and to limit your search to different types of documents, publication year, and other facets.
Search Help provides guidance on how to construct a search. Like many of other search engines, a search for more than one term automatically retreieves results containting all the terms. Quotation marks can be used for phrase searching. But other search syntax is availalble to help you construct more sophisticated searches.
Plural, genitive and other word forms will be searched automatically. To disable this feature, choose "Verbatim search" in the advanced search or in the search field on the results page.
If you choose the option "Multi-lingual search" in the advanced search or in the search field on the results page you can also search for synonyms and translations, provided that the search term is included in Eurovoc Thesaurus or Agrovoc Thesaurus.