Phillips School of Nursing Information Commons: CINAHL

CINAHL, the 'Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature is a comprehensive database that provides indexing of the top nursing and allied health literature available. A 30 minute video is available from the Levy Library Education and Research Services Team below. 

If you know your keywords already (i.e Wound Care, Diabetes Mellitus, Pregnancy), you can type them into the search box. CINHAL defaults to advanced search.

If you need help with the correct medical subject heading terms, click the suggest subject terms box at the top of the page and then select search. This will take you to the page where the correct medical headings are located. 

For example, type Nursing Ethics into the search bar after selecting "suggest subject terms." 

Once you are on the CINAHL Suggest Subject Terms Page, you can select what keyword works best for your search. Here we have selected Ethics, Nursing, which is the medical subject heading for nursing ethics. If you select Ethics, Nursing you can view the subheadings involved with that term underneath it. 

You can 'explode' the term or make it a "major concept." 

Using Explode and Major Concept:

Explode:

When you Explode a term, you create a search query that “explodes” the subject heading. The headings are exploded to retrieve all references indexed to that term as well as all references indexed to any narrower subject terms.

In a database with a tree, such as MeSH or CINAHL Headings, exploding retrieves all documents containing any of the subject terms below the term you selected. In other databases, exploding retrieves all documents containing the selected term, as well as any of its first level of narrower terms. If a plus sign (+) appears next to a narrower or related term, there are narrower terms below it.

Major Concept:

When you select Major Concept for a term, you create a search query that finds only records for which the subject heading is a major point of the article. Searches are limited with specific qualifiers (subheadings) to improve the precision of the search and limited to major subject headings that indicate the main concept of an article.

Combining Explode and Major Concept:

If you select both Explode and Major Concept, you retrieve all references indexed to your term (and its narrower terms) and all articles for which the subject heading is a major point of the article.

Select Search to get to the Home Page to apply limiters (date ranges, language, written by a nurse, etc.) and find articles. You can combine two or more searches with OR or AND. To learn more on how they work in CINAHL, view the information on Boolean Operators. 

Combining search terms will narrow or widen the scope of your research. OR will broaden a search while AND will narrow it. This example shows articles in nursing ethics OR holistic nursing, giving more search results. 

Under advanced search, you may limit your results for relevancy with options like:

• Date ranges
• Written by a nurse*
• English Language
• Peer-Reviewed

This may also be completed on the search results page or search history page. 

Find articles on the home page. Search by relevance or date (change at the top) and choose how to view the page. The recommended view is detailed so the abstract is viewable in the search results. The results list will show up with limiters applied if you did them on the advanced search page or search history. Limiters give a smaller number of results that are tailored to research needs (i.e current and relevant articles, articles written by nurses, peer-reviewed articles, etc.)

Scroll until you find an article. To view select PDF or View at Levy Library (what is available).

Save relevant articles to your CINAHL profile in folders.

Select the article you want to read and check out the details - this is where you can email, cite, save, export, get the permalink, share, and add to your folder. 

Click on "View as PDF" if available. Or, click the "view at Levy Library" button to open the library catalog. Select download  PDF link or article link to read.