Carol, I'm another who's only skimmed the other messages. I replying to your help with searching request. There are a lot of resources that cost libraries lots of money, but are delivered through the internet. A good example would be that your institution may have access to the electronic version of Psychological Abstracts (PsycInfo). It might be on a CD-ROM on campus or it might be remote on the internet. In any event, it's much more complete & efficient to use than going though each print volume separately. You might still have to read printed articles but the tedium of writing all those citations down is gone.

Many libraries now have access to aggeregations of journal literature. The most well known are InfoTrac, ProQuest, or EbscoHost. You can do word searching across the full text of everything in the aggregation, which is targeted to an academic audience.

Almost daily I am signing up for electronic access to journal literature & some sources are beginning to link from indexes like PsycInfo to the electronic version. This is a moving target that changes daily.

Usually I'd say don't so academic research on the general, freely available part of the internet. Given your topic, it might work out OK. The Internet has been very self referential from the beginning, so internet oriented psychologists might very well have their papers up for free. Which reminds me, one of the very first free, scholarly, internet only journals is Psycholoquy. I see there's a link there CogPrints a well. Truly, though, your best bet is PsycInfo and the journal literature. You'll find what's been published in Psycholoquy and the print literature.