Exploring CINAHL

The Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature, or CINAHL, is one of the primary databases for the literature of nursing and the allied health professions. Despite its name, CINAHL covers a wide range of medical and health sciences, and related disciplines. Though it has some overlap with MEDLINE, it is an important resource because it covers many journals that are not indexed by MEDLINE. CINAHL is owned and distributed by EBSCO Information Services, and is available only by license.

Easy! The EBSCO Advanced Search offers individual search boxes into which you can enter your terms. You can search using CINAHL subject terms derived from the CINAHL thesaurus, or you can look for keywords occurring anywhere in the CINAHL record. Both are useful search strategies, and when used together, will help to find as many articles as possible. The following video will take you through a sample CINAHL search in which we search for articles on deep-vein thrombosis and airplane travel.

Here is the search strategy for the sample search in the above video:

((MH "Air Travel") AND (MH "Venous Thrombosis" OR "deep vein thrombosis" OR "deep vein thromboses" OR dvt))

In this example, "MH" indicates a CINAHL subject heading; all other terms were searched as keywords.

If you're still a bit confused about the difference between searching with subject headings and searching with keywords, check out the Search Tips page on the Health Sciences Research Guide.

Before we proceed, let's review the different methods we've covered that enable you to focus and refine a search.

If your original search brings up too many results, you can combine it with a second term to find articles that discuss both concepts. We did exactly that in the previous video, in which our first search on Air Travel brought up over 1,365 results, but when we combined it with the term Venous Thrombosis, the total dropped to just 107 results.

We also discussed two additional strategies for refining your results: the use of subheadings and the Major Concept feature. Both should be used cautiously, as they are quite restrictive. However, they can be helpful in certain circumstances, such as when you are searching on a very broad topic that brings up large numbers of results (e.g., smoking, diabetes, stroke).

In the next video, we'll explore a few more strategies for refining a search. Once we've done that, we'll be ready to review the results, and proceed to finding the full text of the articles.

1. If your search brings up too many results, which of the following strategies could be used to reduce and focus the numbers?

a) "Explode" the original term to capture articles on the more specific terms

b) Limit results to meta-analyses or systematic reviews

c) Limit results to "Major Concept"

d) Search on a more general term

e) a and d

f) b and c

g) a, b, and c

h) all of the above

2. If your search brings up too few results, which of the following strategies could be used to broaden the search?

a) "Explode" the original term to capture articles on the more specific terms

b) Limit results to meta-analyses or systematic reviews

c) Limit results to "Major Concept"

d) Search on a more general term

e) a and d

f) b and c

g) a, b, and c

g) all of the above

3. If you can't get the full text of the journal article, what should you do?

a) forget about that article, and find a different one

b) buy the article direct from the publisher by using your credit card

c) submit an Interlibrary Loan request through Dana Medical Library

Dana Medical Library, University of Vermont

Burlington, VT, USA

(802) 656-2201

danaref@uvm.edu

1. f: applying any type of "limit" will have the effect of reducing the total number of results

2. e: both of these options would have the effect of expanding the search

3. c: submit a request for the article via Interlibrary Loan