CINAHL: Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature

CINAHL is the primary specialty bibliographic literature database for nursing and allied health. It includes MEDLINE subject headings in addition to over 11,000 subject headings specific to CINAHL.

Nursing publications include the American Nurses Association and the National League for Nursing Subject coverage includes the following disciplines from allied health Physical Therapy Physician Assistant Radiologic Technology Medical/Laboratory Occupational Therapy Additional resources for this database include Nursing dissertations Selected conference proceedings Standards of professional practice Access from the Library’s “Quick Links”—CINAHL Full Text Full-text articles are accessible using the Find It @ MCG icon

CINAHL Full Text via EBSCO Search Strengths

• Uses thesaurus of subject headings developed for this database

• Subjects Headings adapted from NLM MeSH Headings for MEDLINE

• CINAHL is divided two separate databases by publication date

• CINAHL: publication dates 1982 to present

• CINAHL Plus with Full-Text: publication dates 1937 to present

• Citation results can be narrowed into five categories

• Source Type

• Subject

• Subject: Major Heading

• Age

• Gender

• Article Preview is a mouse over pop-up window. Reviews the title, source, date, and abstract before deciding to view full citation

• Limits can be set before initial search or within the search results

• Additional limits include special interest groups, evidence-based practice, publication type, and journal subset

• Clinical Queries limits search strategies to scientifically sound and critically relevant study reports, therapy-high sensitivity, prognosis, review, qualitative, and causation (etiology)

• Peer Reviewed limits search results to articles from peer-reviewed journals (sometimes called referred journal)

• "Cited References” presents a list of records cited in your original article (a.k.a. the articles Bibliography records)

• Times Cited in this Database” links to how many times that particular article has been cited in CINAHL

• Publication toolbar tab lists the journals and magazines available in CINAHL with available publication dates and years available to full-text articles

• Download citation to a citation manager like Endnote Web

• Can save search strategy in CINAHL to use at a later time

• "Cite" icon in full citation is a pop-up window listing the bibliographic styles for AMA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, MLA, and Vancouver

• Turn on/off auto complete keyword search suggestions in the preferences

• My EBSCOhost personalized folder allows users to store Images, Videos, Persistent Links to Searches, Saved Searches, Search Alerts, Journal Alerts and Web Pages.

CINAHL Full Text via EBSCO Search Cautions

• When combining searching terms using CINAHL Headings the default is OR

• Default search page is a basic search

• Basic keyword searching does not automatically run a search that includes CINAHL subject headings

• Subject heading terms are not automatically exploded to include more focused terms

• Combining two or more concepts as subject headings, the second/third searching term is entered into the browse for box

For a complete tutorial on how to use CINAHL see the Tutorials and User Aids page.