If your proposed article involves academic disciplines other than law — areas like economics, political science, history, sociology, gender studies, psychology, business and management — then you should check for articles in those areas that might preempt your project.
This added step will take some time, but it should be worthwhile. You may find not only that you are not preempted, but that there is a lot of useful scholarship that will help you research your article and shape your arguments.
Your search results may include articles for which only the citation — and not the full text — is not available. To find the full text of an article when you have the citation, enter the title of the journal in the Journal Finder.
These tools let you search across disciplines without limiting your search to a single academic area or field. (These tools will often lead to or cite to articles from both scholarly and non-scholarly sources. They also might lead to legal articles as well.)
USF's Gleeson Library subscribes to many article-finding tools devoted to individual academic fields, such as economics, business, psychology, sociology, history, etc. To discover which tools are available for your field or discipline, visit Gleeson Library's Databases page, and select "Databases by Subject."
Google Scholar, while not comprehensive, provides a quick way to get a cross-disciplinary set of articles. It can be especially useful as you start your research and are still refining your search terms.
So you have a citation to a great-sounding article — but not direct link to the full text....
How do you tell if the article is available at USF?
Just use USF's "Journal Finder" to look up the title of the journal that published the article. If that journal is available at USF, it will (usually) show up in the journal finder.
(One caveat: the Journal Finder doesn't tell you if a journal is on Westlaw or on Lexis Advance.)