PSYC 260H: Introduction to Social Psychology  

PsycINFO
With over 2,000,000 records, this is the most comprehensive collection of academic psychological work and relevant materials from related disciplines.

Articles Plus
Articles + provides a unified search of hundreds of databases and links to full text articles in journals and newspapers, among other sources.

More individual article databases by subject

Google Scholar

When searching for empirical articles, you can search by terms, or keywords, related to your hypothesis. For example, If you were interested in the impact of gratitude on happiness, you may start with this basic search:                                              

Perhaps you find reference to a study in an article in Psychology Today. According to the Psychology Today article Karen Campbell is the lead author on the study. You can do an author search in PsycINFO to help locate the original article. You would search last name, first name and select AU Author.

This may give you too many results (in this case 30), so you may need to limit your search. If you were given the name of the journal the original article appeared in, or the date the original article was published, you could limit by either or both of those items. In this case, the secondary article only gives the name of the lead author and what the study was about (associative memory). You can add the study topic as an additional search term to limit your results.

A newspaper cites a study done by Barbara Fredrickson which appeared in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. You can again search by author, but also by journal title this time. To limit by journal title select the field SO Publication Name and enter the title in box to the left.