CINAHL Complete

You may have a lot of criteria to follow when using an article. You might need only articles written by nurses, or articles from journals published in the United States. CINAHL's Advanced Search features make it easy to limit your search in a variety of ways.

Scroll down for explanations on some of CINAHL's limiters. 

If you search the databases and get thousands of results, you may want to make sure that you have enough limiters set. Or if you are getting zero or too few results, you may need to take off or adjust some of your limiters (for instance, search articles from the last 3 years, rather than 1 year).

If you have any questions about using the database or any of these limiters, contact a librarian. 

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.

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