Non-Legal Databases

This page contains a selective list of non-legal databases that are available to all CUNY campuses. The databases included on this page were selected for their potential relevance to researchers at CUNY School of Law. For a complete list of all the licensed databases available to current CUNY students, faculty and staff, go to the CUNY Office of Library Services Databases & More page.

**New CUNY Law Library Electronic Resources Page** The CUNY Law Library Electronic Resources page provides a complete list of all our legal and non-legal research databases plus popular subscription resources. Selected free resources are also included. Searchable by subject or keyword.

Accessing the Databases

Unless otherwise indicated, the databases linked on this page are available only to current CUNY students and faculty. For home access you must obtain a library barcode number and enter it when prompted. If you are having trouble accessing any of the databases, see our database access help page for more information.

Finding Journals by Title

Use the Journal Search page in the CUNY Law Library’s online catalog if you need access to a particular journal in full-text. If you do not find a particular journal, or you have trouble accessing a journal link that appears in the results list, please contact one of our librarians.

Copyright Questions

CUNY has a Web site called ©opyright@CUNY, providing extensive information on copyright compliance to all CUNY faculty, staff and students.

Federated Search Engine

EBSCO Discovery Service

This tool is a federated search engine that enables you to search across multiple (but not all) non-legal databases available to all CUNY campuses. It is provided by EBSCO, but it is not limited to EBSCO databases. The first page allows you to choose pre-selected groups of databases by subject. If you click on the “Databases A-Z” link you can specify exactly which databases you wish to combine. Using this tool is similar to using meta search engines, where the results you get may not be as complete as searching each database or search engine individually.

Multi-Disciplinary Databases

Academic OneFile (Gale)

According to Gale, Academic OneFile is the premier source for peer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world’s leading journals and reference sources. Includes extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects.

Academic Search Complete (EBSCO)

According to EBSCO, this scholarly database contains “more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals.” Journal coverage includes “nearly all academic areas of study – including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies.”

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

Provides links to over 3.900 peer-reviewed, scholarly journals covering a variety of subjects (mostly in the sciences). Access to these journals is free and many of them provide full-text search options. However, you can’t search multiple journals at the same time through DOAJ.

EBSCO Host – All EBSCO Databases Combined

This page allows you to select and combine several or all of the EBSCO databases we subscribe to and search them simultaneously.

General OneFile (Gale)

Gale’s largest general interest periodical resource, General OneFile, provides periodical and news information through an intuitive, user-friendly search interface for researchers at all levels. Content includes more than 12,000 titles in all with nearly 30 years of coverage.

Google Books – Advanced Search (includes popular magazines)

Google has been adding the text of millions of books and magazines to its database. Use the “Magazines” content limit on this advanced search page if you wish to search only the text of magazine articles. Magazine articles that are out of copyright or available through the author or publisher’s permission can be read or downloaded in full. For scholarly journals, use Google Scholar (discussed immediately below).

Google Scholar

This link takes you to directly to the advanced search screen. Note the default option is to search journals in all subject areas, but there are some choices to limit the search to subject area groups. Search results will include law journals that are freely accessible on the Web.

Humanities Source (EBSCO)

JSTOR Arts & Sciences

Contains a selective group of scholarly journals in a variety of subject areas. The advanced search page includes a list of disciplines that can be used to focus your search. There are several different JSTOR databases. CUNY subscribes to Arts & Sciences I – X and the Arts & Sciences Complement database. More information.

MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO)

This database includes more than 1,900 periodical titles in full-text. It differs from the EBSCO Academic Source Complete database in that the focus of MasterFILE is on the needs of public library users, so there is less emphasis on academic journals.

* More Multi-Disciplinary Databases offered by the CUNY Office of Library Services

Book Finders

CUNY Online Catalog

Use this link to search our law school’s library catalog, which includes our print collection as well as electronic books, journals and databases we have access to. The “select library” menu on the search page also allows you to select other individual CUNY library collections, or you can search all CUNY libraries at once.

Books in Print

List of all books currently in print or forthcoming throughout the world. Be sure to use the advanced search field if you want to limit your results by status, format, subject, etc.

Ebook Central

An extensive electronic book collection (formerly known as Ebrary) that can be searched in full-text. The titles cover a wide range of subject areas, including some law and law-related topics. Many of these are recently published books. Links to the individual books in this collection also appear in our library’s online catalog. Note that some titles are removed from this collection every month due to publisher licensing agreements. If you have questions about an electronic book that you were using and can’t find anymore, be sure to ask one of our librarians.

Google Books

Google has been adding the text of millions of books and magazines to its database. Using this Google Books link limits your search to just the books and magazines. The advanced search option gives you more specific options to search for words in a title, subject, etc. Books and magazines that are out of copyright can be read or downloaded in full. Extensive previews are available for many of the books that are still in copyright, and links to libraries and bookstores where they may be borrowed or purchased are included. Google also provides options for creating your own virtual library using this site.

WorldCat

An online catalog that allows you to search millions of bibliographic records from OCLC member libraries. Note that this particular resource is not a “legal database” as it contains records for books from all disciplines, not just law. It has been included on this Web page as a source to find books that aren’t contained in the collection of the CUNY School of Law Library. Please contact our library if you are having difficulty finding a specific book or wish to obtain one through interlibrary loan.

Business Databases

Business Insights: Global (Gale)

Business Source Complete (EBSCO)

Provides access to full-text journals in business disciplines such as marketing, management, MIS, accounting, banking, finance, etc. Additional non-journal content also available including books, financial data, conference proceedings, industry reports, company profiles and more.

EconLit (EBSCO)

American Economic Association’s database indexing economic literature. Includes more than 1 million records going back to 1969.

* More Business Databases offered by the CUNY Office of Library Services

Demographics & Statistics

Infoshare

NYCdata

Open to the public.

Social Explorer

Education Databases

Education Source (EBSCO)

ERIC (EBSCO)

From EBSCO’s ERIC help page: “ERIC, the Educational Resource Information Center, provides access to education literature and resources. The database provides access to information from journals included in the Current Index of Journals in Education and Resources in Education Index. The database contains more than 1,194,000 records and links to more than 100,000 full-text documents from ERIC.”

Professional Development Collection (EBSCO)

Designed for professional educators. Includes over 500 full-text journals and over 200 educational reports.

* More Education Databases Offered by the CUNY Office of Library Services

Health Databases

CINAHL (EBSCO)

Full-text access to over 500 scholarly journals related to nursing and allied health fields. Also includes the Lexi-PAL Drug Guide.

Health Reference Center Academic (Gale)

Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition (EBSCO)

This is an index database for journals related to nursing and allied health fields. Over 2,900 journals indexed.

JAMA – Journal of the American Medical Association

Medline Complete (EBSCO)

This site uses the EBSCO interface to search Medline and includes access to many of the articles in full text.

New England Journal of Medicine

PubMed

A useful collection of resources from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. Featured is PubMed, an index containing over 19 million citations for biomedical articles from MEDLINE and life science journals, some including links to full-text. Many other health resources are available from this site.

* More Health Databases Offered by the CUNY Office of Library Services

History Databases

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale)

The publisher claims that this database includes “every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.” Major sections of the database include History & Geography, Social Science & Fine Arts, Science, Technology & Medicine, Literature & Language, Philosophy & Religion, and Law. More information. To see a more detailed description of what is contained in this database, select “help” and then use the product description link on that page.

The Making of the Modern World (Gale)

A collection of books, journals, newspapers, etc., documenting world history from an economic perspective covering the period from 1453 – 1939.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online (Gale)

According to the publisher, “Nineteenth Century Collections Online is a multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century, with archives releasing incrementally beginning in spring 2012. . . The content is sourced from the world’s preeminent libraries and archives. It consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages.”

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Collection (Gale)

More than just a collection of historical English newspapers, this resource also includes books, pamphlets, Acts of Parliament and more collected by Reverend Charles Burney, described by the publisher as “the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media.” Publications from the British Isles as well as the “colonies” are included, so this can be used a source for research into early American history during the colonial period.

Slavery & Anti-Slavery: A Transitional Guide (Gale)

Slavery and Anti-Slavery includes collections on the transatlantic slave trade, the global movement for the abolition of slavery, the legal, personal, and economic aspects of the slavery system, and the dynamics of emancipation in the U.S. as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions. The collections include books, journals, U.S. Supreme Court decisions and briefs, encyclopedias, and more. The database is divided into the following categories that may be searched individually or in combination – part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition, part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, part III: The Institution of Slavery, and part IV: The Age of Emancipation. More information.

Newspapers

The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Historical New York Times 1851-2013 (ProQuest)

Complete coverage available for download in pdf.

New York State Historic Newspapers

Free resource.

New York State Newspapers (InfoTrac)

Coverage includes: Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY), Herald American (Syracuse, NY), Herald-Journal (Syracuse, NY), New York Observer (New York, NY), New York Post (New York, NY), New York Times, Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY). Specific dates of coverage not provided, but the search form goes from 1985 – present.

Psychology Databases

PsychArticles (EBSCO)

Provides full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific articles in psychology. According to EBSCO, the database contains “more than 137,000 articles from 66 journals – 50 published by the APA, and its imprint the Educational Publishing Foundation (EPF), and from allied organizations including the Canadian Psychology Association and Hogrefe Publishing Group.”

PsychINFO (EBSCO)

Devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. Provides abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations. According to EBSCO, the database contains “over 2.5 million citations and summaries dating as far back as the early 1800s. Journal coverage, which spans from 1887 to present, includes international material selected from more than 2,200 periodicals in more than 27 languages.”

Reference Databases

Biography Reference Bank (Wilson)

Includes over 550,000 people and provides links to full-text articles. More information.

Book Review Digest Plus (Wilson)

Coverage back to 1983. More information.

Britannica Academic

Includes Encyclopædia Britannica plus Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, magazines and periodicals, and many other research tools.

Gale Virtual Reference Library (Gale)

An excellent collection of general and subject-specific reference sources that can be searched individually or in combination.

Library & Information Science Source (EBSCO)

Oxford English Dictionary

This is the online edition of the famous multi-volume print version, with definitions for over 500,000 words. Contains the contents of the current print version, plus updates as they are added that will appear in the new print version when it comes out. The publisher claims over 2.5 million quotations are included to show the usage of words, which is a particular strength of this dictionary.

Oxford Reference Online

An outstanding collection of reference resources that can be used individually or searched in combination. Includes general and subject-specific dictionaries, encyclopedias, quotations dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, maps and more.

Readers Guide Full Text Mega (Wilson)

Includes selective full-text back to 1994, abstracts back to 1984 and indexing back to 1983. More information. See also Reader’s Guide Retro for indexing from 1890 – 1982.

WorldCat

An online catalog that allows you to search millions of bibliographic records from OCLC member libraries. More information.

* More Reference Databases Offered by the CUNY Office of Library Services

Research Tools

RefWorks

You must create an individual account to use this product that helps you organize and format research papers..

Science Databases (for Medical Science, see Health Databases)

Applied Science & Technology Source (EBSCO)

General Science Full Text (Wilson)

Includes select full-text back to 1994, abstracts back to 1984 and indexing back to 1984. More information.

GreenFILE

A free environmental index database hosted by EBSCO. GreenFILE indexes scholarly and general interest titles, as well as government documents and reports. The database contains nearly 300,000 records, full text for selected titles and searchable cited references for more than 200 titles as well.

National Geographic Magazine Archive

Covers the period 1888-1994. For more recent issues, search our online catalog by title to see if they are included in other databases we have access to.

Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science

Science Magazine

ScienceDirect (Elsevier)

A leading science database that includes full-text articles from over 2,000 peer-reviewed journals and chapters from over 10,000 books.

* More Science Databases Offered by the CUNY Office of Library Services

Social Science Databases

Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940

This resource consists of 20 individual collections, with a total page count of nearly one and a half million pages. Documents span from 1940 to 2014, with the bulk from 1950 to 1990. This archive is useful for scholars and researchers focused on gender and LGBTQ studies, women’s studies, American studies, civil and human rights, journalism, social movement history, British twentieth-century history, and more.

Black Thought & Culture (Alexander Street)

CIAO – Columbia International Affairs Online

According to the publisher, CIAO is “the most comprehensive source for theory and research in international affairs. It publishes a wide range of scholarship from 1991 onward that includes working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, proceedings from conferences, books, journals and policy briefs.”

Ethnic Newswatch (PROQuest)

Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

A huge database of statistics, survey results and other information for social science research.

LGBT Life

This database has been made available to us by the central CUNY Office of Library Services. Contains the content of more than 120 historically significant LGBT journals, magazines, and regional newspapers as well as more than 150 full-text monographs and books including Classics in Lesbian Studies, Gay Science: The Ethics of Sexual Orientation Research, Handbook of Research with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Populations, Queer Theory & Social Change, etc.