CINAHL – Part 1

Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature

Before you go any further, download the document: Nursing Databases Guide(http://www2.indwes.edu/nursing_databases_handout.pdf)

• It gives you a guide to using the variety of nursing databases available from IWU.

2

CINAHL

• Covers nursing, allied health, biomedical and consumer health journals, publications of the ANA and the NLN

• 1982 to the present

3

Click on: Nursing, Article Databases

OCLS Home Pagehttp:www2.indwes.edu/ocls

4

Locate CINAHLComplete and click on it.

5

6

To get the most relevant results, click on the CINAHL Headings tab

7

But first, let’s talk about CINAHL Headings. Why use them?

• These are the controlled vocabulary of subject headings. (Language of the database.)

• Each item indexed in CINAHL is assigned a set of subject headings designed to describe the item content.

• They are known as Major orMinor Subjects.

Note: This article has several headings to describe the content of the article. 8

But first, let’s talk about CINAHL Headings. Why use them?

• It is possible to have articles that never mention the terms you might be searching for as keywords*, yet after reading the article, the indexers confirmed that the content truly was about Treatment Errors. The assigned subject heading (Treatment Errors) would help you locate this article even though that term is never used in the article. You would never find it doing a keyword search.

*Keyword searching is using your natural language directly in the search box with no qualifiers. 9

But first, let’s talk about CINAHL Headings. Why use them? (cont)

• Let’s say your topic was about medical errors, you could get a lot of articles about errors in a keyword search, but not necessarily medical errors! Furthermore you would discover that the correct term for this in CINAHL Headings is: Treatment Errors.

10

But first, let’s talk about CINAHL Headings. Why use them? (cont)

• A keyword search looks for the words anywhere in the record; a CINAHL headings search looks for the term only in the Major or Minor Subjects field.

• You will get articles by keyword, but using the CINAHL headings uses the right language for this database and gets you to the most relevant articles the fastest way.

11

To summarize:• Keyword search looks for terms anywhere

in the record and will get a results set of records containing the term.

• Subject searching looks for the term in the subject field only; it has to be phrased in “CINAHL” language; and it will get a results set of records about the term.

But first, let’s talk about CINAHL Headings. Why use them? (cont)

12

But first, let’s talk about CINAHL Headings. Why use them? (cont.)

• Indexers predetermine that the article has sufficient content for the assigned CINAHL headings. You locate all the articles discussing this topic! (Time saving tip!!!)

• Lets see how it works with a sample search.

13

Continue viewing CINAHL, Part 2.

14