Use Annual Reviews to find detailed overviews of the state of social sciences research on important questions. For any given review, the works cited section will give you leads on important scholarship for that area of investigation. To find important work published after the review, copy and paste the review title into Google Scholar, then click on "Cited By."
To track down books, try WorldCat.org. It has entries for books here at UNLV and in other libraries. Interlibrary Loan will bring in books from other libraries free of charge (it takes about a week).
For articles, try Google Scholar. If working on a non-UNLV machine, make sure you have the UNLV Library Link activated -- this will link Google Scholar to our library system and give you more links to the full text of the articles you find. To activate the link, go to Settings, then Library Links, then search for University of Nevada Las Vegas. If you click the checkbox next to UNLV, that will connect Google Scholar with our library's electronic resources.