These databases are freely accessible to the public. They don't require a login. Some include scholarly content, and some do not.
Database | Description |
---|---|
Google Scholar |
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. |
AGRICOLA |
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. |
Census Data |
Provides access to data about the United States, Puerto Rico and the Island Areas based on several censuses and surveys. Includes 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 |
American Memory Collections |
Multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library of Congress' National Digital Library Program. |
Amnesty International Library |
Makes available the text of news and newsletters, reports, actions, press releases, and other information about human rights issues around the world. |
ArXIV |
Well-established open-access pre-print server hosting unpublished e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, and Economics. |
bioArXiv |
A free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. |
Bureau of Justice Statistics |
Searchable statistical reports on all aspects of criminal justice in the US. |
Census of Population and Housing 2010 |
Gateway to the 2010 Census from the U. S. Census Bureau. |
ChemIDPlus |
Information on over 400,000 chemicals including synonyms, structures, and regulatory information from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. |
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers |
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. |
CORE - (U.K.) |
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. |
CORE: Open Access for the Humanities |
Articles, book chapters and other documents authored by humanities researchers and posted on Humanities Commons, a non-profit, academic social networking site. |
CoreData.nyc |
Research tool for New York City housing and demographic information created by the Furman Center at NYU. |
Country Studies |
Library of Congress authored books describing and analyzing the political, economic, social, and national security systems and institutions of over 100 countries |
Criminal Justice Data for New York State |
Searchable statistical reports on criminal justice in NY state from the NY Division of Criminal Justice Services. |
Digital Commons Network |
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. |
Directory of Open Access Books |
A discovery service for peer reviewed books published under an Open Access license. |
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) |
A curated, independent, searchable directory of open access peer-reviewed journals. |
Drug Information Portal |
A gateway to selected drug information from the National Library of Medicine and other key government agencies. |
Europeana |
Europeana provides direct access to more than 15 million photos, paintings, film clips, audio files, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers, and archival papers from major European cultural institutions. |
Fatal Encounters |
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. |
FCSM |
Gateway to U.S. government statistics from over 100 agencies. |
FIREDOC |
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. |
Getty Publications Virtual Library |
Provides free online access to more than 250 backlist titles on art and art history, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Research Institute, with new titles added on an ongoing basis. |
Google Book Search |
Google is in the process of scanning complete books from some of the world's great libraries. Books in the public domain can be read in their entirety. Some books will display in part. |
Google Scholar |
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. |
Guide to Law Online |
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. |
Historic American Newspapers |
Contains historic newspapers from 1836-1922 and a U.S. Newspaper Directory for American newspapers published between 1690-present. Website produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. |
Killed by Police |
Aggregates corporate news reports and Facebook pages of people killed by nonmilitary law enforcement officers, whether in the line of duty or not, and regardless of reason or method. Inclusion implies neither wrongdoing nor justification on the part of the person killed or the officer involved. The post merely documents the occurrence of a death. Searchable by year beginning May 2013. 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. |
Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC) |
Portal to select internet resources relating to Latin American studies organized by subject and country, providing access to a wide variety of full-text resources. |
Medline via PubMed |
National Library of Medicine's database (via PubMed interface) of millions of references to articles published in licensed or freely available biomedical journals. |
MedlinePlus |
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. |
MetPublications |
A portal to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's comprehensive book and online publishing program with close to 700 titles published from 1964 to the present. |
National Archive of Criminal Justice Data |
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. |
National Registry of Exonerations |
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. |
NCBI bookshelf |
A growing collection of searchable biomedical books hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. |
NCJRS - National Criminal Justice Reference Service |
Searches and often provides the full text of federal, state, local, and foundation reports, as well as abstracts of journal articles and other websites. |
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations |
NDLTD is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations; full-text is free for all; excellent source for international dissertations. |
New York City Charter, Code, and Rules |
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. |
New York City Crime Map |
Interactive crime map created by the NYPD showing date and location for the seven major NYS penal law felonies (murder, rape, robbery, felonious assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny motor vehicle). Data available for current and previous calendar year and by month within each period. |
New York Public Library Databases |
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 and pick it up at the nearest NYPL location. |
New York State Slavery Records Index |
A searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and their owners, beginning as early as 1525 and ending during the Civil War. Data comes from census records, slave trade transactions, cemetery records, birth certifications, manumissions, ship inventories, newspaper accounts, private narratives, legal documents and many other sources. The index contains over 35,000 records and it is expected to grow as John Jay College professors and students locate and assemble data from additional sources. |
Newspaper archives |
Freely available list of newspaper archives. |
NYC Department of Records and Municipal Archives |
The Municipal Archives holds historical records that document the actions of City government, dating to the colonial era. |
NYS Historic Newspapers |
The NYS Historic Newspapers project provides free online access to a wide range of newspapers chosen to reflect New York's unique history. |
Occupational Outlook Handbook (BLS) |
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. |
Online Books Page |
Provides author, title, and subject access to hundreds of thousands of non-copyrighted online books freely available on the Web. |
PsyArXiv |
A fairly new searchable preprint server for hosting unpublished academic papers in psychology. |
Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
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. |
Pubmed |
Searches citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Some are free or available via a John Jay subscription. Some are for sale. |
PubMed Central |
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). |
SocArXiv |
SocArXiv is a free and publicly accessible platform for social scientists to upload working papers, pre-prints, published papers, data, and code. |
SSRN |
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. |
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |
Entries are maintained and kept up to date by experts in the field. Access is unlimited and free to everyone. |
Supreme Court Database (funded by the National Science Foundation) |
Provides legal scholars with extensive data, like background issues, reasons for acceptance, chronology, outcome impacts, and judge's opinions, for Supreme Court Cases since 1953. Funded by the National Science Foundation. |
TOXNET |
Indexes journal articles, books, and reports (written for scientists) on the toxicological, pharmacological, biochemical and physiological effects of drugs and other chemicals. Coverage from 1965 to the present. |
Transportation Article File |
Index to articles in journals and books on transportation from Northwestern University's Transportation Library. |
Transportation Research Information Service (TRIS) Online |
Provides access to 400,000 bibliographic records covering transportation research published in books, journal articles, technical reports and other media |
U.S. Fire Administration Library |
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. |
Umbra Search |
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. |
Uniform Crime Reports |
The FBI's compendium of crime statistics. It includes volumes from 1995 to the present. The print version is available at the Reference Desk. |
VictimLaw |
Information on victims rights and protections including Constitutional provisions, statutes, court rules, administrative code provisions, case summaries, and attorney general opinions. Includes overviews of the justice system and a glossary. |
World Health Organization Statistical Information System |
A guide to health and health-related statistical information from the World Health Organization. Includes statistics on AIDS/HIV and other diseases. |
World Legal Information Institute |
A free, independent and non-profit global legal research facility providing access to over 1230 databases from 123 jurisdictions developed collaboratively by 14 Legal Information Institutes including the Cornell Legal Information Institute. A good resource for finding contemporary legal materials from foreign countries. |