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When your professors say something like "find five articles for your reference list", they are typically asking you to track down peer-reviewed publications from an academic or research journal. These journals usually have names like Journal of Experimental Biology, Science, or Annual Review of Plant Biology.
There are hundreds of journals for different subjects and disciplines, so to save researchers time and energy trying to search through all of them individually, many of them are collected and made available through literature databases like BIOSIS Previews or Environment Complete. These databases offer streamlined searching and in many cases also provide access to the full-text of articles. In cases where the full-text is not available in that database, the Libraries often can provide access through other resources.
There are some things you need to know about articles as well as other source types in order to find the most appropriate sources for your research. The following pages contain information about different source types and how to find them.