Lloyd Sealy Library

Library guide introducing users to archival research

A library guide to researching primary sources.

Access to articles from magazines and peer-reviewed journals, as well as books, conference papers and proceedings, and educational reports from almost all academic areas of study.

Collection of over 4,000 books of high quality in the humanities that are recommended and reviewed by scholars frequently cited in the literature offered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in collaboration with other learned societies.

Catalog and index to the collections of the National Agricultural Library, as well as a primary public source for world-wide access to agricultural information. The database covers materials in all formats and periods, including printed works from as far back as the 15th century. Useful for forensic science.

Index and some fulltext to journal articles and reviews on the history and culture of the United States and Canada. Inlcudes CLIO notes (see top of interface) providing chronologies and brief summaries of  significant events and themes in history.

Full-text of articles from a collection of the American Chemical Society journals.

Multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library of Congress' National Digital Library Program.

Collection of Annual Review Journals featuring literature reviews in the fields of Social Science.

Articles in journals and trade publications covering the applied sciences, including engineering, math, physics, and computer technology with coverage dating back to 1913. 

Index to articles in leading periodicals in the Arts from 1984 to the present.

See Gale Literary Sources

A free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Original biographical profiles plus feature articles, interviews, essays, book reviews, performance reviews, speeches, obituaries, and images.

Contains the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans, and includes interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other ephemeral material.

A comprehensive online guide to book reviews that includes more than five million review citations from thousands of publications, with linking to more than 630,000 full-text reviews.

Searchable statistical reports on all aspects of criminal justice in the US.

Detailed company and industry profiles including SWOT reports, market share reports, and financial reports; thousands of company histories and industry essays from Gale's core business collection; case studies, scholarly journals, and business news for deep research coverage of global economies.

Census.gov is the new government platform for delivering data through many individual tools (e.g., American FactFinder, OnTheMap, My Congressional District) to a model where those tools’ capabilities are integrated and served on a single platform. including the following data:

• American Community Survey   
• American Housing Survey  
• Annual Economic Surveys   
• Annual Surveys of Governments   
• Census of Governments  
• Decennial Census  
• Economic Census 
• Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Tabulation 
• Population Estimates Program   
• Puerto Rico Community Survey

Chemical database is a dictionary of over 400,000 chemicals (names, synonyms, and structures). ChemIDplus includes links to NLM and other databases and resources, including links to federal, state and international agencies.

Provides access to  America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 and the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

Comprehensive source for theory and research in foreign affairs; includes working papers from university research institutes and NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, and conference proceedings.

Journal articles, encyclopedias and handbooks in the fields of communications and mass media.  For film reviews search by document type. For motion pictures search by subject.

Search for open access scholarly articles from institutions across the world.  CORE’s mission is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public.

Research tool for New York City housing and demographic information created by the Furman Center at NYU.

Library of Congress authored books describing and analyzing the political, economic, social, and national security systems and institutions of over 100 countries

Provides access to CQ publications available online including CQ Almanac, CQ Researcher Plus Archive, CQ Magazine (formerly CQ Weekly), Political Handbook of the World, Politics in America and Supreme Court Yearbook. Also provides access to these CQ resources now available on the Sage Knowledge Platform: Congress and the Nation, Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court, Historic Document Series, Vital Statistics on American Politics and the Washington Information Directory. More about how to use CQ publications »

Explores a single hot issue in the news in depth each week. Topics range from social and teen issues to environment, health, education and science and technology.  Also Reports on international topics such as torture, nationalization of energy resources, peacekeeping around the world, etc. Coverage from 1923 to the present.

Comprehensive news service published by the Center for Media, Crime and Justice, at John Jay College, covering challenges and issues of 21st century criminal justice in the United States.

Provides scholarly articles and annotations of books and book chapters in criminal justice. Coverage from 1968 to the present.

Searchable statistical reports on criminal justice in NY state from the NY Division of Criminal Justice Services.

An index to the Lloyd Sealy Library's Trial Transcripts of the County of New York 1883-1927. Several transcripts have been digitized and are available online.

Electronic access to over 12,000 dissertations and capstones from the Graduate Center of the CIty University of New York published between 1965 and 2014. Requires authentication with a CUNY library barcode number. For more information read here.

Defines the vocabulary of the first six centuries (600 - 1150 A.D.) of the English language, complementing the Middle English Dictionary (which covers the period 1100 - 1500 A.D.) and the Oxford English Dictionary (which documents the development of the English language to the present), the three together providing a full description of the vocabulary of English. Also see Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus which contains at least one copy of every surviving Old English text. 

The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work. 

A discovery service for peer reviewed books published under an Open Access license.

Full text of dissertations published from 1997 and abstracts from 1980. Also, Indexes close to two million dissertations and theses from institutions in North America and Europe from 1861.

When searching OneSearch  using your CUNYfirst login credentials to include this database in your search.

Selected documentaries and social issues from Icarus, BullFrog and other distributors. Issues covered include history, politics, anthropology, human rights, and justice and environment broadly interpreted. From independent & progressive documentary makers.

A gateway to selected drug information from the National Library of Medicine and other key government agencies.

The most current edition of the standard diagnostic tool used by mental health professionals; each psychiatric disorder with its corresponding diagnostic code is accompanied by a set of diagnostic criteria and descriptive details.

A constantly expanding collection of thousands of ebooks in a broad variety of disciplines from ProQuest (formerly Ebrary).

Access to articles from magazines and peer-reviewed journals, as well as books, conference papers and proceedings, and educational reports from almost all academic areas of study.

Access to articles in international economic journals, as well as essays, research papers, books, dissertations, book reviews, and working papers. Coverage from 1969 to the present.

For full-text resources in education with coverage dating back to 1929.  (Content from Education Index and Retrospective (formerly owned by Wilson) is now part of this database.)

A collection of close to two hundred leading management and library and information services journals.

Topics include global warming, food safety, access to health care, and the impact of economic development on international relations. Reader-friendly; may be especially appreciated by non-science majors and beginning science students.

Provides access to journal articles and documents in education. Coverage from 1966 to the present.

Provides access to more than 200 newspapers, magazines and journals from the ethnic, minority and native press. Includes materials in Spanish. To find movie reviews limit the document type to movie review.

National database of people killed during interactions with law enforcement since 2000. Content based on a combination of media sources, public documents and information uploaded by volunteers.   Users can search by name or by state,  then depending on results, can search by county, year, age, race or signs of mental illness.

Note: This database is a work in progress, and like any open web resource, seek to corroborate any data with other sources such as the Uniform Crime Reports database maintained by the FBI and accessible through the library website.

Reports by industry practitioners on facility, IT, network, personnel, financial and legal security, risk and crisis management, and public safety.

A comprehensive streaming video collection  of 1,000s of full length educational videos and clips covering a broad range of topics.

You can search by title, by keywords in segments, browsing titles alphabetically, and browsing or searching within the subject area. Most of the titles in the collection have closed-captioning and many have interactive transcripts.

Index to over 70,000 technical documents, conference proceedings, and journal articles on all aspects of fire science, safety and engineering; some entries have links to online BFRL Publications.

Foreign Policy website including access to Foreign Policy Magazine

This  collection of over 300 reference books in forensic science and related fields is included in search results on the Taylor and Francis platform. 

Note: It is no longer  possible to limit your search to just this collection.

Hundreds of specialized encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographical directories and other ebooks in the subject fields of criminal justice, economics, history, literature, psychology, religion, science, world cultures, and more.

Provides access to thousands of newspapers from the U.S. and foreign presses including images, audio and video clips,  including, when available to the top five U.S. newspapers: The New York Times,The Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Coverage from 1977 to the present. (from NOVELny)

Hundreds of specialized encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographical directories and other reference books in the subject fields of criminal justice, economics, history, literature, psychology, religion, science, world cultures, and more.

Provides access to scholarly journals and magazines covering topics including gender studies, family and marital issues from the Academic OneFile and General OneFile databases.

Access to popular and professional science journals published in the U.S. and Great Britain. Coverage from 1984 to the present.

Focuses on issues beyond the United States, with news articles, videos, statistics, reference materials & some academic articles.  Includes foreign, English language newspaper articles written for readers in other countries.  User friendly; focus is on broad topics.

Crawls (indexes) the content of publishers' websites, scholarly journals, indexes, academic websites, institutional repositories, etc. to find information of a scholarly nature. Does not provide comprehensive coverage of any one field. Enter through the library's website so that you will be linked to the library's licensed resources. 

Search engine dedicated to helping institutions and individuals find grants to fund their research. It provides a personalized funding recommendation service to simplify the grant search process. 

Please note that users have to set up individual accounts and will be recognized by their email domains.

Access to the entire text of the 34 vol. Dictionary of Art from Grove, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, with updates and links to images.

An annotated guide to national and international sources of government and legal information prepared by the Law Library of Congress; includes links to treaties, constitutions, and codes.

A bibliography on Latin America consisting of works selected and annotated by scholars. Edited by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, the multidisciplinary Handbook alternates annually between the social sciences and the humanities.

Articles about health policy and administration in academic journals, monographs, magazines, and trade publications.

Several historical American and international law collections incuding law reviews and journals from their first volume of publication, the Federal Register, Presidential Documents, U.S. Congressional Serial Set, Attorney Generals Opinions, World Constitutions, legal classics, and the newest collection, Slavery in America and the World; History, Culture and Law. A comprehensive user's guide to this database is available at  https://heinonline.org/HeinDocs/HOLUserGuide.pdf.

Provides access to academic historical journals that cover the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Coverage is from 1955 to the present.

To access this database you must login with your NYPL library card.  If you don't already have a NYPL library card you can apply for one here.

This is a digital collection of manuscript and archival materials focusing on the 20th Century including main collections such as:

Black Freedom Movement and Civil Rights (includes records of four of the most important civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s: NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE).

Southern Life and Slavery (documenting the realities of slavery "at the most immediate grassroots level in Southern society" providing "some of the most revealing documentation in existence on the functioning of the slave system."

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research provides access to an archive of social science data from more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations.

It maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files and hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.  

Comprehensive search engine for exploring 9,500 study abroad programs. Directory by country, field of study, cost, length of study, etc.  Includes sources of scholarship funding, internships, and other information about study abroad.

An open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

This collection of over 60 handbooks on information technology security, is included in search results on the Taylor and Francis platform.

Note:  It is no longer possible to limit your search to just this collection.

An index to the social sciences that is unique in its broad coverage of international material and incorporates over 100 languages and countries.

Selected articles, news feeds, reports, summaries, books, blogs, FAQs, and proprietary Background Information Summaries that pertain to terrorism and security.

A wide range of content from the leading voices in physics.  Includes the physics of spectroscopy, cancer, the environment, green energy, the atmosphere, astronomy, optics & photonics, bio & medical physics, geophysics, nanotechology, materials & plasmas, mathematics & computation, quantum, classical and nuclear physics.  Over 100 journals in the IOPScience Extra Collection, and books in the IOP Publishing Concise Physics, Series 1 through 4, and IOP Publishing Expanding Physics, Series 1 through 4.

We provide access to Kanopy titles if needed by faculty for use in class.   Faculty may request the library purchase a 12 month long license to view a specific title by sending an email to the media librarian  Ellen Sexton  esexton at jjay.cuny.edu  

Articles on current issues, studies, thoughts and trends of the legal world with coverage dating back to 1908. Content from Index to Legal Periodicals and Books (formerly owned by Wilson) is now part of this database.

Articles in the field of library, information science, and education techology.  (Content from Library Literature and Information Scrience (formerly owned by Wilson) is now part of this database.)

A curated literature hub for tracking up-to-date scientific information about the 2019 novel Coronavirus, from the National Library of Medicine.

Provides access to literary works and authors throughout history and includes more than 150,000 full-text poems and 800,000+ poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays. The database also includes secondary materials like biographies, images, and more.

Provided by the Harvard University Press, this online resource provides more than 520 volumes of Latin, Greek, and English texts in a modern interface that  allows readers to browse, search, bookmark, and annotate content. Content cannot be downloaded or printed.  (Note:  The library  has the print edition of the Loeb Classical Library).

Articles from many popular sources covering nearly all subjects including general reference, business, health, and more.

Provides many of the materials indexed in Medline. Covers medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and more.

Provides access to authoritative consumer health information from the National Library of Medicine and other organizations as well as drug information and an illustrated medical encyclopedia.

Access to all  twenty reference yearbooks; covers commercially available English-language research instruments (questionnaires, surveys, diagnostic tests, attitude scales, standardized tests) used by educators and psychologists to measure human educational skills, personality, vocational aptitude, psychology, and related areas.  Typical MMY test entries include descriptive information, two professional reviews, and reviewer references, written with the goal of encouraging informed test selection.

Articles from journals and other periodicals and current news pertaining to all branches of the military and government.

Data collections relating to criminal justice from federal and state agencies, and grant-funded projects. Provides documentation, and browsing and downloading access to most of the data.

Library catalog of the National Fire Academy. Indexes journal articles, books, and reports in fire science and emergency management. Items not owned by John Jay may be available via Interlibrary Loan.

Conducts and supports alcohol-related research in a wide range of scientific areas.  Use this link for the archived Alcohol and Alcohol Problems Science Database (ETOH), produced by NIAAA from 1972 through December 2003.

Provides detailed information about  all known exonerations of innocent criminal defendants in the United States from 1989 to the present.  Includes statistical and interactive displays that allow you to sort the data based on different issues including by DNA and Non-DNA exonerations, type of crime, race and contributing factors.

A comprehensive collection of classical music available online, comprising the complete Naxos, Marco Polo and Dacapo catalogues, which include Classical, Jazz, World, Folk and Chinese music.

Searches and often provides the full text of federal, state, local, and foundation reports, as well as abstracts of journal articles and other websites.

Searchable and browsable public portal to the laws of New York City including:  New York City Charter,  New York City Administrative Code and the Rules of the City of New York.

Click on title to access in LexisNexis Academic and then click on TOC - Table of Contents -- in upper left hand side of screen Or arrows to browse.  See subject guide on Finding Legal Information for more information.

Holders of New York Public Library cards have access to 100s of electronic databases, many of which are accessible wherever you have an Internet connection.

Any person who lives, works, attends school or pays property taxes in New York State is eligible to receive a New York Public Library card free of charge. You can apply for a NYPL card online.

Full text access to the New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) from June 1, 1980 to present. (Part of  National Newpaper Core database).

Full text of articles and page images of the New York Times from 1851 to 2014.

Nexis Uni features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources formerly found through the LexisNexisAcademic platform - including federal and state laws and cases, constitutions, municipal codes and law review articles. The  interface  is designed to offer quick discovery across all content types. Register for a personal NexisUni id to use personalization features such as Alerts, saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents .

• Top10 Nexis Uni features
• Self Registration Tips for Nexis Uni
• Nexis Uni Search FAQ
• Customizing Your Nexis Uni ID

An eclectic collection of digital collections of primary source materials mostly from British and American libraries.

Online gallery with more than 900,000 images—the largest collection of historical images of New York City in the world. The Online Gallery provides free and open research access to items digitized from the Municipal Archives' collections, including photographs, maps, motion pictures and audio recordings. 

Explore 700,000+ items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections. New materials are added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.

Biennial publication of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Describes what workers do, working conditions, training and education needed, earnings and job prospects in a wide variety of occupations.

Provides author, title, and subject access to hundreds of thousands of non-copyrighted online books freely available on the Web.

Access viewpoint articles, topic overviews, statistics, primary documents, links to websites, full-text magazine and newspaper articles, and multimedia on social issues (from NOVELny).

The complete text of the OED's twenty-volume Second Edition and three-volume Additions Series. The worldwide standard source for English word definitions, word pronunciation, word history and usage.

In-depth, peer-reviewed long-form articles on foundational and cutting-edge topics in Criminology and Criminal Justice.

Index to books and journals  with some links to full text. Coverage from 1902 to the present.

Bibliographic database covering the Published International Literature On Traumatic Stress (PILOTS) and other mental-health conditions resulting from traumatic events. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs and produced by the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  

Well known open access publisher, founded as a non-profit in 2001 to transform research communication by publishing journals with rigorous reporting and peer review.  

Highly specialized collection of electronic information for professional educators, professional librarians and education researchers.

Use this link to search all ProQuest databases available through the library simultaneously.

Online access to the Protection of Assets Manual and Bulletin, the basic manual for security personnel.

Thousands of articles from journals published by the APA and allied organizations. Coverage from 1988 to the present.

Companion database to the scholarly PsycINFO database. It consists of technical and annual reports, newsletters, magazines, newspapers, consumer brochures and more.

Psychological Experiments Online is a multimedia collection that pairs audio and video recordings of experiments in psychology with thousands of pages of primary-source documents. It includes notes from experiment participants, journal articles, books, field notes, and final reports in topics from obedience to authority and conformity to operant. The collection contains over 70 streaming videos totaling more than 45 hours of viewing time. Videos include lectures, presentations, documentaries, experiment footage and interviews.

PsycINFO (Psychological Abstracts) searches  PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, and PsycEXTRA in one search.

A collection of free law materials including case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and federal and state constitutions.

PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). 

Provides access to general-interest periodicals published in the U.S. from 1983 to the present as well as comprehensive indexing to periodicals published from 1890 to 1982.

Covers regional business news in metro and rural areas within the United States.

Hundreds  of ebooks and subject encyclopedias, including major titles in criminal justice, research methods, psychology, and social issues from Sage and CQ Press.

Contains the Encyclopedia Americana, the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, and the New Book of Knowledge. (from NOVELny)

Access to journals in the sciences and social sciences.

Abstract and citation database to peer-reviewed journal titles from international publishers in science, technology, social science and medicine. Results can be refined by author affiliation, funding source, and more. Coverage from the 1960's to the present. 

When searching OneSearch  using your CUNYfirst login credentials to include this database in your search.

Search for cited cases and check the validity of a citation.

Available only through LexisNexis Academic. Click on 'Search by content type' on the upper right, then find Shepherd's Citations under 'Legal.'

Brings together all known legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery. Much of the non-legal material in this collection is based on the holdings of the Buffalo Public Library. Its rare book collection contains hundreds of nineteenth century pamphlets and books on slavery.  A quick reference guide on how to ue this collection can be found at  https://heinonline.org/HeinDocs/SlaveryQRG.pdf

Displays interactive maps of U.S. Census data going back to 1790, U.S. election data, U.S. crime data (FBI/UCR), World Development Indicators, and more.

Compilation of  ProQuest collections in the social sciences with deep coverage of sociology, politics (including PAIS International), criminal justice, education (including ERIC), and linguistics. Provides abstracts, indexing and full text coverage of journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, working papers and more.

Contains core coverage journals dating back to 1895, and some priority coverage journals. Also includes full text for many books, monographs, and conference papers.

Statistics from the current Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics with ongoing updates and the archive back to 1994. The print version is available at the Reference Desk.

Very large, well established repository of social science (and other) academic papers.  It was founded in 1994 as an open repository, but bought in 2017 by a for-profit publisher, Elsevier.  The vast majority of the papers hosted on the site are free to download. 

These freely available websites aggregate state legislative information, providing a more uniform and user-friendly search experience and the ability to compare legislative activities across the states.

1. Openstates.org
2. Legiscan.com  
3. BillTrack50.com (must register, but it is free)

This collection of 400 reference books in statistics, is included in search results on the Taylor and Francis platform.

Note:  It is no longer possible to limit your search to just this collection.

Feature films requested by faculty for curriculum support. Viewable by everyone with a John Jay email address but please note our licenses permit individual or course use only.  Most of the films are from the big Hollywood studios, or overseas equivalent.  

Provides information on undergraduate and graduate programs and interactive online practice tests for entrance exams, certifications, and licensing tests, including LSAT, GRE, and SAT, as well as civil service exams. Includes Peterson's Guides.

Index to articles in journals and books on transportation from Northwestern University's Transportation Library.

Contextual information on hundreds of the most significant people, events and topics in U.S. history. Includes full text magazines, academic journals, news articles, primary source documents, images, videos, audio files and links to vetted websites.

A searchable collection of over 500,000 primary source documents relating to African American history and culture digitized by over 1,000 libraries libraries and archives across the country.

Articles and reports as well as book abstracts about crime and other urban problems, possible solutions, studies of police departments, social welfare agencies, and more.

Short but authoritative introductions to  topics  written by authors who are experts in their field. These short introductions cover a range of subjects in the arts and humanities, law, medicine and health, science and mathematics and  the social sciences.

Provides summary data on political behavior such as voter turnout, election results, public opinion, media trends, campaign financing and more. Some charts provide data from the 1790s, but most focus on the 1940s to 2012. Data can be downloaded.

All members of the CUNY community can set up an individual account to the Wall Street Journal's digital edition.   

Sign up & get more information »

Full text of over 1,400 journals from Wiley-Blackwell Publishers and over 20,000 ebooks.  (Note: You can search all Wiley ePublications on this platform, but you can only access the full text of the Wiley journals subscribed to by John Jay).

Provides access to the current constitution of every country in its native language (English translations for most), and links to related scholarly articles, books, bibliographies, and web sites. More information on how to search this database can be found at https://help.heinonline.org/kb/how-to-search-in-world-constitutions-illustrated/

Contextual information on hundreds of the most significant people, events and topics in world history.  Includes full-text magazines, academic journals, news articles, primary source documents, images, videos, audio files and links to vetted websites.

Brings together primary source documents relating to Latin America and the Caribbean; academic journals and news-feeds; reference materials; maps; statistics; audio and video. Covers  politics, economics, religion, culture, international affairs, the environment, science and technology.