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Introduction
The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) database is an index to literature with a focus on allied health professions as opposed to physicians. This particular focus makes CINAHL a very beneficial resource for searching, ensuring that a wider perspective is obtained when searching for a pharmacy or pharmacological related topic. This article will provide an overview and basic steps of searching in CINAHL using the topic ‘Adverse effects of self-medication in older patients’ as an example.
CINAHL or CINAHL-Plusi is provided to users by the publisher and database provider EBSCO. CINAHL provides indexing to journals from 1981 onwards, while CINAHL Plus includes a wider range of journals and coverage from 1937 onwards. In both instances access to the full text of some articles is available from within the CINAHL database. Users are reminded that full-text articles, if not available from a database (such as CINAHL, PubMed, Medline, Embase, etc), are often freely available either through libraries or publishers’ websites depending on the licensing agreement with the user's institution. Instruction and screen shots in this article will be taken from the EBSCO interface. Detailed search instructions for the EBSCO interface are available in the 38 page User Guideii available at the EBSCO host website; this guide will be referenced throughout this article to provide users with the specific page numbers for instructions.
Advanced or basic search
Upon opening CINAHL most users will be presented with a search screen which is either basic (figure 1) or advanced (figure 2).iii The basic screen offers a single search box while the advanced offers multiple search boxes connected by 'Boolean' operators: AND, OR, NOT. There are pros and cons to each search option, but the advanced screen will offer the novice user an easier way to enter multiple terms and combine …
Footnotes
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↵i CINAHL scope and coverage: http://www.ebscohost.com/biomedical-libraries/cinahl-with-full-text CINAHL Plus scope and coverage: http://www.ebscohost.com/academic/cinahl-plus-with-full-text.
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↵ii See:http://support.ebsco.com/knowledge_base/detail.php?topic=996&id=4256&page=1 Download the file named: en_cinahl_userguide.doc but save as a PDF for easy searching and to click links to move around in the document. The guide referenced in this article was last updated on 24 February 2012.
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↵iii See pages 8-9 of CINAHL User Guide. For more detail choose EBSCOhost Advanced Search Guided Help Sheet from http://support.ebsco.com/cinahl/documentation.php
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↵iv See page 12 of CINAHL User Guide.
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↵v See page 13 of CINAHL User Guide.
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↵vi See page 7 of CINAHL User Guide.
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↵vii 'CINAHL subject headings are used to index the literature contained in the database. These subject headings were developed to reflect the terminology used by nursing and the allied health professionals. CINAHL subject headings follow the structure of the Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH, used by the National Library of Medicine. This structure has been used to develop 12 714 CINAHL subject headings. These subject headings are used to effectively search the database and retrieve literature citations on a specific topic.' See: http://www.ebscohost.com/resources/cinahl-plus-with-full-text/lma/subject-headings.htm
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↵viii See pages 8 and 16 of CINAHL User Guide. For more detail on using CINAHL Subject Headings see:http://support.ebsco.com/training/flash_videos/cinahl_mesh/cinahl_mesh.html
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↵ix Creating a personal account. See page 10; CINAHL User guide. For more detail choose My EBSCOhost Account Help Sheethttp://support.ebsco.com/cinahl/documentation.php
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↵x Saving/Emailing/Exporting results. See p 10, CINAHL User Guide. For more detail choose EBSCOhost User Guide - Print, Email, Save from http://support.ebsco.com/cinahl/documentation.php