Sources: Science!

Here's a list of sources I'm using to find research papers. Many of them support searching by author or keyword, so once you find one article on point, you can use its attributes to find others. Unfortunately many of them reveal abstracts only and require you to purchase full texts (but I suppose that's how they pay for the servers).
(This is not one of my amazingly witting and wittily amazing posts; it's just something I need to keep track of for myself and don't mind sharing. Hey, it's a scrapbook!)

General Purpose

• ProQuest via KCLS: http://www.kcls.org/  (click on "Databases"). ProQuest via KCLS requires a KCLS account, which is free to King County (WA) residents. It is likely that libraries in other counties have similar arrangements. I like ProQuest because you can often get the full text of the article, not just the abstract, although you do have to affirmative select out the non-scholarly stuff.
• RAND Corporation: http://www.rand.org/. RAND has ponderworthy stuff within its areas of interest, and you can often get the full text for free.

Computers

• Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery): http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm. I really like C/ACM's practice of hotlinking articles that cite the article you're looking at. If you find something on point, you can easily roll forward in time to see more current stuff! ACM is also a huge nostalgia trip from my undergrad days; I was never a computer expert but always liked to skim the publications. It's still way ahead of me but plenty readable!
• PR Newswire on Mobile tec: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consumer-technology-latest-news/mobile-entertainment-list//
• http://www.canalys.com/index.html

Health & Medicine

• BioMed Search: http://www.biomedsearch.com/
• National Center for Biotechnology Research (NCBI)/PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ . Lots of medical studies.

Families

• Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics: http://www.childstats.gov/ 
• HHS
• Children's Bureau Statistics & Research: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/index.htm
• Research & Publications: http://www.hhs.gov/homeless/research/index.html
• National Military Family Association Publications:http://www.militaryfamily.org/publications/. Very useful within its subject matter specialty.

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Sources I haven't used as much

Child Trends DataBank http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/

Penn State Population Research Institute:
http://cairo.pop.psu.edu/allen/ProjectsC.cfm

• ABI/INFORM by ProQuest
• Cabell Directory
• Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA)
• Computer Science Bibliography (DBLP)
• Computer Literature Index (CLI)
• DEST Register of Refereed Journals
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Documents in Computing and Information Science(DoCIS)
• Intute: Science, Engineering & Technology
• J-Gate: Informatics
• The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)
• The Index of Information Systems Journals
• Ulrich Periodical Directory

About Writing:

http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWtoc.html