CINAHL: Searching the Nursing Literature
In some of your Nursing classes, your instructor will ask you to search the literature for research articles or evidence. This means using CINAHL (Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature) to find the best articles. Believe it or not, CINAHL is more comprehensive than Google - it intentionally indexes every article from every nursing journal, not just the ones found by Google's crawlers.
- Use one or two key words for best results.
- ALL of the content in CINAHL pertains to Nursing and healthcare topics. Keywords like "nursing" or "patient" may artificially limit your results.
- If you include a search word, your result list will contain only articles where that word appears. Consider synonyms and related terms and try different keywords and combinations of keywords.
- Search using keywords only at first, then add limiters to narrow your results.
- Recommended limiters (click "show more" under the date range limiter bar to the left of your results list):
- Published date: enter year range to limit
- English language (checkbox)
- Journal subset: Core Nursing
- Select this limiter for results published only in scholarly (peer reviewed) nursing journals
- Ursuline Library has online full-text access to almost all of the journals in CINAHL's Core Nursing collection
- Peer Reviewed
- Additional limiters to try:
- Research article (checkbox): This limiter does not necessarily limit to primary research articles, but it does eliminate content that is not research-oriented at all (newsletters, book reviews, etc.)
- Any author is a nurse (checkbox): Try searching with and without this limiter. Sometimes it eliminates articles that really do have a nurse author!
- Special interest: Limits your results to journals focused on specific specialty areas.
