Copy down the article's bibliographic information. If you came across the name of the article from another source, the full information (title, author(s), publication title, issue, volume and date) will appear in that book's references, usually in a footnote, endnote or bibliography. Any one piece of this information can help narrow down your search, but all of it will make your search easy.
Log on to your college's website and navigate to the library's page. Set the search function on the library's site to search for articles and input as much information as you can into the search fields to narrow down the results. Your article may even be available in electronic format to students.
Find your article in the library. If your article is not available online, you will find a catalog number next to the article's information. Copy this down and bring it to the library's reference desk. A reference librarian should be able to find the article from the bibliographical information, but it is important to find the catalog number so you can check if your article is available online.
Log on to the website for the publication in which your desired article appeared. This is easy enough to find with any search engine. For example, for an article published in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America," log on to its website, where the journal is abbreviated PNAS.
Search for your article. Using PNAS as an example, enter your article's title in the search bar in the right-hand column. Always search by title; searching by author will produce many more results you'll have to sift through manually. Some journals may even allow you to search by issue, in which case you can navigate to the month and year your article was published and locate it that way.
Select your article. When you have found the article you are looking for, click its title. PNAS allows content to be viewed for free, but many journals charge a fee to view content on their websites. At this point, you can decide to subscribe to the site to view the article, or search for it in your school's library, where it may already be available to you free of charge.
Log on to a scholarly search engine such as Google Scholar. Your college may have a list of others available to students. Another option is to search your own college's library website by keyword to locate articles.
Search for articles. Type your subject into the search bar and make sure "Articles" is selected from the options below before clicking search.
Find an article. Your search will turn up articles matching your search terms in either their titles or abstracts. Browse through the results until you find an article that matches your research needs. Many articles are linked from university sources directly through Google Scholar's Library Links. If this is the case, a link to the article's location on the university's website will appear to the right of the result link. For example, if you search for "fungi and dinosaur extinction," the first result will be "Fungal virulence, vertebrate endothermy, and dinosaur extinction: Is there a connection?" To the right of the result is a link: "[PDF] from yu.edu." Clicking this link will take you directly to the file's location on the Albert Einstein College of Medicine's website.