You can search for specific journals, and read through titles and abstracts of manuscripts.
Some full text is available for several journals.
If you are beginning to research a topic, you can perform subject, title and author searches of published articles. Some search engines provide a service to send articles to you for a fee. All search engines listed here will allow you to log on and search free of charge. You can then order an article, write the author for a reprint or read the article in the journals at the library. Abstract search engines will let you search for articles and read the abstract online to see if you are interested in the full article.