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What is it?
CINAHL, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, is a database full of nursing and allied health (health care services such as physical therapy, speech pathology and occupational therapy) literature. CINAHL isn't just for nursing students. This database contains consumer health and patient teaching information that has easy to understand, reliable medical information.
Why use it?
CINAHL is a comprehensive source of full text nursing and allied health material. Many hospital and medical libraries subscribe to CINAHL, so if you learn to use it now, you will be ready to use it in the real world.
How does it work?
When medical, nursing and allied health literature gets published, the publishers send the article information to CINAHL to be included in the database. The good people at CINAHL look over each piece of information and assign CINAHL headings to it. CINAHL headings describe the article- what the main topic is (diabetes, dementia, consumer advocacy), who the information pertains to (adolescence, females), and other descriptive information.
These subject headings are the key to conducting a good search because they standardize the terminology used in the articles. For instance, say two authors wrote articles about cervical cancer; one used the term cervical cancer while the other used the term cervix neoplasm. In your research, you want to find both articles, but if you just type in cervical cancer, you will miss the other author's paper. Instead, if you use the proper CINAHL heading "cervix neoplasms," you will retrieve both articles.
Next time you are conducting a search, start off at the CINAHL headings page instead of the main search page. Enter in the term you are researching to find the proper subject heading. Check the major concept box if you are only interested in articles in which the search term is the main concept in the article. You are guaranteed to find articles that only pertain to the subject you are researching.
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Another search tip is to not limit only to full text articles. While a lot of the information in CINAHL is available in full text, you may come across articles that aren't readily available. When this occurs, click on "Check LinkSource for more information." LinkSource will check all of the electronic content that the library subscribes to to see if the article is available elsewhere. Each database that MSOE subscribes to has different full text coverage, so what is available in one database may not be available in another.
For assistance in using this database, MSOE librarians are here to help!