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CINAHL stands for the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and the CINAHL Complete database allows you to search for articles in hundreds of nursing journals. In addition to journal articles, you'll also find evidence-based care sheets, quick lessons, legal cases, clinical trials, and more.
You may have an assignment that requires you to find an article that fits certain conditions: published within the last two years, written by a nurse, from a nursing journal published in the United States, etc. With CINAHL, you can easily limit your search to make sure your results fit all of your assignment criteria.
The most important thing to realize about the databases is that they do not work like Google:
Google interprets. Databases match.
Google is great at interpreting your search terms! You can type whole questions or search phrases into Google and get millions of results.
Take a look at this one, a popular argument paper topic, technology is destroying society. Google that, and you get over 11 million hits:
That same thing in Academic Search Complete?
No results. What's going on?
It does not mean there are not articles in the database about technology and its effect on society, only that we are not searching for them the right way.
Whenever you type something into the database and hit search, the database looks for articles that match what you typed. So in the example above, the database is looking for an article that saysexactly, "technology is destroying society," and it can't find one.
So what is the solution? Think in keywords!
Pick out the most important words or phrases about your topic. What words do experts use about your topic? Is there more than one word or phrase for the same concept?Searching Google or Wikipedia for your topic can be a good way to come up with keywords.
Need help with keywords? Contact a librarian, or try this UT Libraries tool to help you brainstorm keywords.
No one combination of keywords will bring you back everything on a topic. You may have to do several searches in the database using different combinations of keywords to make sure you're not missing some resources.
For this topic, our most important keywords are technology and society. But those words are too general - we want specific words!
In this example, you could brainstorm specific types of technologies (Internet, social media, cell phones, texting, etc.), specific ways they negatively affect society (distraction, low grades, car accidents, cyberbullying, etc.), and specific segments of society they may affect (students, teenagers, children, etc.).
Boolean refers to combining keywords with the words AND, OR, or NOT. It's a way to expand or limit the number of search results you get in the database:
[keyword 1] and [keyword 2] = articles with both keywords
[keyword 1] or [keyword 2] = articles with either keyword
[keyword 1] not [keyword 2] = articles will have keyword 1, but do not have keyword 2
To find a complete list of limiters, click on 'Advanced Search' when you open the CINAHL database:
Scroll down to the section under 'Limit Your Results,' and you'll see a lot of checkboxes and menus to choose from. There are a lot of limiters on this page, so I've broken it up into two screenshots. The most important limiters are numbered, and are explained below the screenshots.
1. Full Text – CINAHL contains citations and full text articles. A citation provides some information about the article (title, author, journal name, abstract), but does not include the article itself. If you select the full text check box, every one of your results will have the full article for you to read.
2. References Available - if you check References Available, your search results will only contain articles that include a list of the references consulted to write that article. You might use this if you want to use the article's bibliography to find additional sources on that topic. However, in practice, checking this box will narrow your search results dramatically, so only use this limiter if you're absolutely sure you need it.
Do not use this limiter if you want to get a citation of an article you find for your own Works Cited list - the database will do that for EVERY article you find! (For more information about the database citation generator, see the "APA Citations" Tab).
3. Published Date – you know how important it is to use current research in the health sciences. Using the published date option, you can limit your results to a certain time period – for example, anything published within the last 3 years. Use the first date range to specify how far back you want to go. Leave the second date range blank to find articles up to the present:
4. Peer Reviewed – by checking this box, your search will bring back articles from peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals publish articles that have been reviewed by a panel of experts in that field and approved for publication; they are the highest level of authoritative and reliabile scholarship that we can use as researchers. If you do not check this box, you will get results back from publications that do not use the peer-review process.
5. English Language - there aren't a lot of foreign-language articles in the databases, but there are enough that it can be frustrating if you keep getting articles in Turkish or Serbian. Some articles might have an abstract in English, but the rest of the article is in a foreign language. Check the English Language checkbox to make sure all your results are in English.
6/7. First Author is a Nurse / Any Author is a Nurse – you may have an assignment to find an article written by a nurse. With these options, you can limit your search results to articles written by nurses. This limiter only applies to articles from 2009 and forward, so by checking this option you will not retrieve articles published before 2009.
It is not unusual for scholarly articles to have more than one author. “First author is nurse” means that the principle author of the article, listed first before any other authors, is a nurse. “Any author is nurse” will bring back articles where at least one author in the list is a nurse.
8. Journal Subset – you may have an assignment to find an article from a nursing journal. If you select ‘Nursing’ from the Journal subset menu, your results will be articles from nearly 1000 nursing-oriented journals, from AAACN Viewpoint to Zambia Nurse.
9. Geographic Subset - your assigment might ask you to find a nursing journal published in the United States. To limit your search to journals published in the United States, select USA from the list.
10. Language - you may have already selected the English Language checkbox, but this menu provides another place to limit your search to English-language articles, if you want. Or if you are comfortable reading in another language, you can select that from the menu - just remember to use search terms in that same language!
11. Number of pages - you may get search results that are very short articles - less than a page, perhaps. While shorter articles can be interesting, they may not provide in-depth information. You could change the drop down box to 'greater than' and enter a number in the box to ensure your search returns results with articles longer than, say, 2 pages:
12. PDF Full Text - the database provides full text articles in either PDF or HTML format, with a majority in PDF format. The PDF is like a scanned copy of the print journal - you'll see the same text and image layout as you'd see in the journal. Articles in HTML format have only the text, so you lose the original layout and images. If you prefer all your articles to be in PDF format, check this box, though you may be losing relevant articles only available in HTML format.
13. San Jacinto College Libraries holdings - if you check this box, your results will be limited to only those journals that SanJac owns in print format. This would limit your results unnecessarily - after all, one benefit of the databases is being able to read the hundreds of journals we don't have in print! But because we have some journals in print that we DON'T get through the databases, you could check this and leave the Full Text checkbox unchecked. Then you could find citations for articles and contact a librarian for help on getting the print version.
The databases make it easy to work with articles in a variety of ways. To find your options, click on the title of any article from your results list and take a look at the Tools menu on the right side of the screen.
Folder
The Folder feature allows you to bookmark many articles to one folder, and go back through them once you're done searching. You must do something with the articles in your folder before you close the database - otherwise they will not be there for you the next time!
Click here for more information on using the folder feature.
The print icon here will print out the article detail page, but not necessarily the complete article itself:
Emailing yourself articles from the database is convenient because the complete article will be included with the email. If the article is HTML Full Text, the complete article will be in the body of the email. If the article is PDF Full Text, it will be included as an attachment to the email.
Emailing yourself articles is also convenient because you can choose to have the database format an APA citation for the article in the email. It won't do it automatically, though. So once you click on the Email icon, choose the Citation Format bubble and pick the citation style you're using from the drop-down menu. In this example I've chosen APA:
Save: Like the Print option, using this Save link will save just the article detail page, not the entire article (unless you have an HTML Full Text article). If you have a PDF Full Text article, open the PDF and use the save icon at the top of the PDF to save a copy of the article to your hard drive or flash drive.
Cite: The database will format citations for you in a variety of citation styles, which can save you a lot of work! After clicking on the Cite link, a small window will open. Simply scroll down to the citation style you're using and copy and paste the citation.
Always remember to double-check citations you get from the database! Sometimes the database will make errors with the citations, so it is your responsibility to ensure the formatting, punctuation, and capitalization of the citation is correct. Click here for more help with citations.
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