The Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Source (CINAHL) database is the most definitive index for nursing literature in the world: It indexes nursing journals, dissertations and more on all topics of nursing practice, theory and education.
Key Definitions:
- A CINAHL subject heading is a controlled vocabulary which creates a thesaurus of terms to help in more effectively searching the CINAHL database. Each bibliographic record in the database is associated with a set of subject terms or topics that are assigned to describe the content of articles. The subject headings reflect nursing or other health profession's terminologies. Using subject headings allow people to more efficiently retrieve the needed literature in a consistent and organized manner.
- A keyword in CINAHL is a word or phrase which describes the main concepts associate with your research topic. Keywords are used when it's difficult to determine subject headings or subject headings don't yet exist which describe a concept. They locate concepts which are in the title, the abstract and content of articles. They tend to retrieve more results but with less relevancy.
CINAHL Tips:
- CINAHL Subject Headings
- Should generally be used instead of keywords to find relevant and specific literature
- Should be checked for relevance by using the Scope Note to determine correct definitions
- Multiple subject headings can be used simultaneously for comprehensive results
- Should be examined within the record to locate additional subject headings
- Choose the "Explode" feature to retrieve as much literature as possible
- Nursing Terminology:
- It's tempting to use broad keywords like "nursing" in CINAHL, but use more specific subject headings like, "nursing practice" or "nursing knowledge" or "nursing care" or "quality of nursing care" or "nursing education" or "nursing students" or "nursing role" to begin
- Use nursing terms to find literature which discusses the nurse's role or nursing implications. It's easy to find medical or public health literature literature, but to locate nursing literature, ensure that nursing subject headings are used instead of medical terms. For example, use "nursing ethics" instead of "ethics"
