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:
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.
Databases are collections of thousands of articles (and often book chapters, book reviews, conference proceedings, dissertations, and other items) organized by subject. The Libraries have hundreds of databases covering every academic discipline. Some are multi-disciplinary, covering a broad range of subjects and including popular and scholarly sources, and others are subject-specific, and include scholarly and specialized articles. A complete list is available at Find Articles.
The following multi-disciplinary databases are good places to start your research: