CINAHL Complete

CINAHL allows you to search all the publications in the database, both those with full-text access and those that only list citations. You can see if the database carries a particular journal, and if so, what kind of access and date coverage is available for that journal. Or you can search for all journals on particular topic. Then you can limit your database search to one or more specific journal titles.

To access this feature, choose Publications from the menu at the top left of the CINAHL search screen:

The Publications search screen looks like this:

You could use the alphabet menu to browse the complete list of journals, but it would be easier to use the search feature. There are two basic types of searches you can do: search for one, specific journal, or search for a list of journals about a topic.

To search for one, specific journal, enter the journal name in the Browsing box and leave the bubble on Alphabetical. Then click Browse:

If the database contains the journal you're looking for, it will appear at the top of the results list, with similarly-named journals underneath. In this case, we've determined that the CINAHL database DOES provide access to the Journal of Nursing. 

The dates underneath the name of the journal tell us how much of the journal we have access to through the database. In this case, you can access the full text of Journal of Nursing back to October 2007, and the citations ("bibliographic records") back to 1994. Remember, if you ever find an article in the database that's not full text, contact a librarian to get the article for free through interlibrary loan.

Click on the journal title for more information about the journal, including where it is published, the type of journal, if it is peer-reviewed, and other information. In this case, if you were required to use a journal published in the United States, Journal of Nursing would not work for you, since it is published in Taiwan:

Use the menu to the right of this screen to either search within the journal (search ALL articles in the database from the Journal of Nursing), or to browse a journal issue (see every article in one particular issue):

You can also search for journals about a particular topic. For example, if you're interested in finding database journals that relate to wound care, you could perform the following search:

Be sure to change the bubble from 'Alphabetical' to 'By Subject & Description' before you perform this type of search.

The search for 'wound care' returned 20 journals, all of them related to wounds and wound care.

You can click on the title of any of the journals for more information, like we saw with the Journal of Nursing above. Or, to search within one or more of these journals, select the checkboxes of the journals you'd like to search:

When you have finished selecting the journals you'd like to search, click the Add button, and the journals will be added to the Search box at the top of the screen.

If you clicked "Search" at this point, you'd see every article from those journals in the database. But you can also add keywords to this search - just make sure to connect them with the word 'and.'

In this case, I've added the keyword nursing, in order to search for articles from the Journal of Wound Care and Wound Care & Practice that include the word nursing somewhere in the articles' description:

This search brings back over 2,400 results! Remember that once you're on a page of search results, you can limit to Full Text articles, or use the Advanced Search link  to set your usual limiters while keeping the search terms the same.

If Chat is offline, you can email questions to reference.librarian@sjcd.edu