VNSG 1234 | Pediatric: What is CINAHL?

CINAHL is the Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature, and the CINAHL Plus With Full Text 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.

For help using CINAHL, contact a librarian or see our CINAHL LibGuide.

 The CINAHL database is the best place to start looking for nursing journal articles, for many reasons:

It has more stuff: 

• You can't find everything on the Web with a Google search. Many scholarly articles and publications are not available for free online, and can only be accessed through subscription databases like the ones we offer at SanJac.

It's reliable:

• Using websites for research can be risky if you don't thoroughly evaluate web sources for accuracy, substance, authority, currency, and other considerations. When you use sources from the databases for your research, you can be confident you are using vetted, scholarly sources.
  

It's easy to limit your results:

• The database makes it easy to limit your results to articles that fit your assignment criteria, such as articles written by a nurse or from a nursing journal. Use the Limit Your Results tab in this guide for tips.
  

It's free:

•  If you search for articles using Google or Yahoo, you may be asked to pay for the full text of an article. You will never be charged for an article in the library databases. Even if you find an article that we don't have full-text access to through the databases, the librarians can always order it for you - free of charge - through interlibrary loan.

It's convenient:

• Search the databases 24 hours a day from wherever you have Internet access. You can even download the EBSCOhost app for iPhone or Android to search the database from your smart phone.

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