Home    Basics Search Strategies EResources Things to Try Contact Linda Hansen Things to Try on Your Own CINAHL Basics

Introduction

CINAHL is the electronic equivalent of the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature. It indexes and abstracts English language nursing journals, the publications of the American Nursing Association, publications of the National League for Nursing, and a few other publications for various allied health disciplines. On a campus of the University of New Brunswick, or from home using your UNB login and PIN, you can access CINAHL with Full Text through the Ebsco interface. In addition, UNB Libraries offers several other databases which might be helpful to health sciences students. For other suggestions and links, see: UNB Libraries' (Saint John) Guide to Nursing & Health Sciences.

Please note: although the Ebsco system offers the option of simultaneously searching some databases in combination, this is not recommended. To create and perform the most accurate, complete, efficient and effective search, proceed through one database at a time.

Although the suggestions and comments below are directed specifically to the use of CINAHL through the Ebsco search interface, they may be broadly applicable to searches you undertake in other computerized environments.

If you have questions about CINAHL through Ebsco or difficulties setting up your searches, remember that your professors and librarians are available to assist you.

Creating the Initial Search

Begin by constructing a clear statement of your research topic and your goals. This will provide you with an indication of what you expect to find and what you are attempting to search and research. For some help, see From Topic to Paper

CINAHL through Ebsco opens by default to the Advanced Search page. Although there are a number of options and limits available on this page, begin very simply.

Think of some terms which clearly express the concepts in which you are interested. For instance, if you are interested in the impact of various types of educational material on the health and well-being of middle-aged women at risk for heart attacks, do not try entering a long string of words at the beginning of your search or setting every possible option and limit.

Instead, break your topic apart and think of relevant terms or phrases which describes your search, for instance, you might begin with the phrase "heart attack". At the top of the screen, the clickable link CINAHL Headings will let you see what subject headings relate to your term. In this example, you would click CINAHL Headings and you might key the term heart attack, select Relevancy Ranked, and Browse.

The system responds:

(Click term to view tree and subheading details.)

Heart Attack Use: Myocardial Infarction
Myocardial Infarction
Heart Attacks Use: Myocardial Infarction
Heart Catheterization Scope
Heart Valve Prosthesis
Heart Defects, Congenital
Myocardial Ischemia Scope
Heart Rate Variability
Pulmonary Heart Disease
Heart, Mechanical Scope
Heart Neoplasms Scope
Heart Failure
Heart Assist Devices Scope
...
heart attack(Search as Keyword)

Clicking directly on the linked term Myocardial Infarction produces "Trees" showing the relationship of the term Myocardial Infarction to a narrower term, Shock, Cardiogenic, to broader terms such as Cardiovascular Diseases and Heart Diseases, and to other related terms such as Acute Coronary Syndrome.

Sometimes the heading can seem unhelpful. For instance, if you key in school nurse -- thinking of nurses who work (practice the profession of nursing) in a school system -- CINAHL suggests Schools, Nursing as an appropriate subject heading, which is not the same thing at all. However, it also suggests School Health Nursing and a look at the tree places that heading under Health Occupations - Nursing as a Profession.

If no appropriate subject heading appears, you may have to get creative. Consider:

• Is it a new or recent term? -- For instance, the term Energy Drinks only appears in 2013. To find earlier material, you may have to use a combination of headings such as beverages and caffeine along with a keyword search of the phrase "energy drinks".



• Is it spelled correctly? -- Our fingers sometimes key theraputic abortion when we mean therapeutic abortion. If your search produces the message, The term xxx would appear here had there been an exact match, or it says No results found, look carefully at the spelling.



• Did you spell it the way the system has it spelled? Have you accounted for alternate spellings? -- behavior may produce thousands of more hits than behaviour but may not include all those returned by the behaviour search. There are also less obvious examples such as: ageing / aging; burnout / burn out / burn-out; healthcare / health care.



• Did you use an abbreviation? A search on some abbreviations may produce a No results were found message. Sometimes, an abbreviation may cause many things to appear which are unanticipated, unwelcome and impossible to cope with within the limits of the search interface. Searching cat may result in records referring to cognitive analytic therapy, computerized axial tomography, critically appraised topic, complementary and alternative therapy, California Achievement Test, Child Abuse and Trauma, a cat, catalase, or even parts of other terms such as Mac CAT-T, CAT-PAD, Cat-ch-Ing EPI, CAT-CAM, or CAT+ where neither the hyphen nor the plus are searchable and are replaced by the system with a space.



• Is one of the words searched a stop word (that is, a word the system might ignore or treat differently than you anticipate)? For instance, if you search "role of school nurses" as a Boolean phrase you will get the same number of results as you do searching the Boolean phrase "role the school nurses". The word the and the word of are being treated as placeholders by the system, rather than individual and distinct words.



• Did you use the "wrong" form of the term? Did you mean the people or the condition? For instance, you might search diabetes mellitus or you might find that diabetic patient produces more relevant results.



• Can you determine another term that means something similar? Using our example above, you might keyword search "school nursing" as a Boolean phrase. You could then look at several of the items returned to determine the appropriate subject heading(s). Many of the returns suggest School Health Nursing as a Major Subject Heading. Key that in on the CINAHL Headings page and Browse. Clicking directly on the linked term, you will see the "Tree" showing that School Health Nursing is a narrower term within the broader term Nursing as a Profession.

Once you have found an appropriate subject heading, initially have the system include all subheadings. This is especially important if you are going to add a second or even a third subject heading to focus your search. Remember you are trying to balance between precision and recall -- retrieving as many relevant results as needed, not simply lots and lots of results.

Ultimately, you might hope to retrieve between 30 and 150 solid hits -- many more might indicate that you created too broad a search, significantly fewer might indicate it was too narrow a search. You want enough to create a context or framework for your topic but not so many that you become overwhelmed. Both what you search and how you search it will likely play a significant role in the number.

Refining the Results

Once you have your basic subject search results, you may want to add a limiter to your search. For instance, you might want to limit by age group (for instance, Child <6 to 12>, or Middle Age <45-64>). Alternatively, you might want to limit to All Adult or All Child.

Once you have structured your initial searches around the subject and content limits of your topic, you may notice that some of the items are journal articles, some are commentaries, some are editorials, etc. At this point, you may wish to modify one or more of your searches by limiting your returns to all types of refereed (juried, peer reviewed) journals. You may want to choose a particular kind of peer reviewed journal (blind peer reviewed journals; double blind peer reviewed journals; editorial board reviewed journals; expert peer reviewed journals) or simply peer reviewed journals. Remember, the fact that the journal is peer reviewed does not mean that every item within it was peer reviewed nor does it mean the content and the opinions offered in the article are "right". Further, everyone may not agree about the peer reviewed status of a particular journal (periodical).

For more on peer review, see: Periodicals (and Peer Review)

Be careful with limits -- they may not be operating as you think. For instance, limiting a set of results to Female may still include Male (that is both, rather than one instead of, or excluding, the other).

Top of Page

This page created and maintained by Linda Hansen.
Comments and suggestions to: lhansen16@gmail.com
Created: 2002/10/02 Last updated: 2016/08/01
Terms of Copyright
This document: ...tutor/cinahl.htm