Many academic journals can be accessed online by joining your
From my own experience it takes a bit over a week to get your library card.
I would recommend using some software to assist you to keep a track of all the references you consult, and to make it very easy to generate a bibliography when you are writing up your research. Mendeley and Zotero are both good choices that will integrate well with whatever document processor you choose to write up your research. Mendeley (but not Zotoro) currently integrates into Overleaf v2.
It is essential that you can document the progress of your work in a way that allows your work to be authenticated if required. Students can choose to use either a google doc that is shared via google classroom, or a latex file shared on Overleaf, both of which will provide timestamps of when edits are made to the logbook.
If your research is mathematically intensive, I would suggest using a version of LaTeX to write up your work. Lyx is a gentle introduction to LaTeX, but I use Overleaf, as it allows me to work online and have more control over the appearance of my documents.
Google docs has an add-on called "Auto-Latex" that I use for including mathematics in my google docs work.