A particular paper that comes to mind is:
On orders and vanishing of integral cohomology groups, Angelina Chin
Here she obtains a recurrence relation involving the orders of the cohomology groups of a finite group $G$ whose quotient by a normal subgroup is cyclic.
- Using Hopf's formula or $H^2(G,\mathbb{Z})\cong Hom(G,\mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z})$ should get you the orders of groups for 2nd cohomology.
- You can check to see if your group has periodic cohomology (period $d$), and then $|H^n(G,\mathbb{Z})|=|H^{n+d}(G,\mathbb{Z})|=|G|$ for some $n$.
- (Trivially) You can check to see if your group is cohomologically trivial, and then its cohomology vanishes.
- For abelian groups you can probably get some information from the explicit calculation of $H_*(G,\mathbb{Z}_p)$, given in Theorem V.6.6 of Ken Brown's Cohomology of Groups textbook.