In short, there's no easy straightforward foolproof way to find everything you need to be able to find in a realm that's as labyrinthine as Chemistry's literatures. There are tools that can do a lot, but the more powerful they are, the more complex they seem to be. And none of the tools is omniscient. And every day "the literature" swells.
So what is this literature? A lot of it is reports of primary research, published in journals. There are a great many journals in which chemists publish, and (as academics go) chemists publish a lot; nowadays most publications are in English; and almost nobody reads what chemists publish recreationally.
WHY do chemists publish? Partly it's for conventional academic reasons --tenure, promotion, other forms of academic obligation-- but that can't account for most of the volume. A fundamental motivation is to establish priority for a discovery --or, to look at it in a somewhat more romantic light, to add to the edifice of Science, to the moving frontier of human knowledge. Sometimes there's money in it, and the highly specialized world of patents is especially concerned with that prospect.
Whatever. But academic libraries accumulate enormous volumes of paper on which people report the results of research in great detail, and most of it will never be read, except by very small numbers of people who happen to be working on the same thing, and they read because they have to know what others in the same area are up to.
By the way, ChemAbs identifies review articles with an R at the beginning of the abstract number (you'll also see P for patents and B for books).
Many journals have Web home pages that offer search utilities --thus, the American Chemical Society's stable of journals can be queried via ACS Free Search (there's a link on, for example, the Journal of Organic Chemistry's home page, covering 1996-present.
Another search possibility is Science, which carries some materials on chemistry. W&L now has full text access to the journal.