Scopus and Web of Science are the big citation and paper services I'm aware of. Access is probably only reasonable through a nearby university, since this stuff is expensive.
I don't have access to Scopus or Web of Science, so I mostly just use Google Scholar.
I usually recognize review articles simply by their titles, which are usually shorter and broader than the titles of experimental papers. Or, I find a handbook / companion / edited volume on the field and look for relevant review articles within.
Let's use cognitive skill acquisition as our example. John located a decent review article from 1996. Since review articles often cite earlier reviews, I checked Google scholar for articles citing that paper from the past 5 years. ...
I'd like to get better at doing literature searches. Luke has written a bit about this, but I still have lots of questions.
I've mostly been using Google Scholar; it seems OK, but not stellar. What other tools are useful and for what? Added: is there a good way to find papers that cite a many of a set of papers (the idea being that if I find a number of relevant papers, I want to see if there's a review which covers them)?
How do you look specifically for review papers and/or books? For example, I'm interested in cognitive skill acquisition and I've found a review paper from 1996 but I'd like to find recent review papers on the same or closely related topics and haven't had any luck. Are there specific keywords or phrase permutations that often help? Is searching just the papers that cite an older paper useful? Is searching the same journal useful?
How do you search for criticism? Lets say I've found a paper that uses a particular method or theory but I want to know whether there are significant criticisms. Are there phrases that are often associated criticism papers?
Are there any activities that are especially good for practicing literature searches?