No, that is not what the principal search box at most university libraries does.
Assuming you select "articles" instead of "all" or "books" in the dropdown menu, this is how it's always worked for me - admittedly small sample size.
Thanks for the condescending first paragraph...
I wan't trying to be condescending. My time is scarce, and I didn't want to waste it doing something you could easily do for yourself (though I did meet you halfway and give one link). Please don't assume that I'm intentionally being mean, especially when I'm offering help.
Yes, there would be some value in only searching items that you can access, but only searching items that you subscribe to sounds like a terrible trade-off.
In practice, searching through a university service has found me more relevant results quicker than using google scholar, which is the reason I prefer it. Searching through less items is often a feature rather than a bug when less items means less irrelevant items - which is often the issue I have with google scholar's results (full disclosure, I don't use scholar often so it may have improved). The key is that the library subscribes to enough services so that you aren't really limited in any way - which is at least the case at WUSTL and ISU in my experience.
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?