Nursing Databases

CINAHL Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature

Topics: Nursing, Biomedicine, Health Sciences Librarianship, Alternative/Complementary Medicine, Consumer Health, and Allied Health Disciplines

Summary: Full text for more than 750 nursing and allied health journals indexed in the CINAHL database plus additional resources including Evidence-Based Care Sheets, Quick Lessons and known article searching.

Scope: Over 5,500 journals and 6 million records, 

Date Range: 1937 - present

Help:  CINAHL Support Center 

CINAHL Basic Search Screen

Advanced CINAHL Searching

Studies have shown that CINAHL is generally the best database to use to find qualitative research articles related to a nursing topic, mainly due to its more in depth thesaurus terms. (Flemming, 2007; Wilcznski, 2007)

In CINAHL choose Advanced Search
 

Refine/Limit your search with Clinical Queries. Select within the following options. The search strategies behind the limiter values are listed below: 

• Qualitative - High Sensitivity: broadest search, will retrieve ALL relevant but may include less relevant 
• Qualitative - High Specificity: most targeted search, will retrieve most relevant but may miss some relevant

• Qualitative - Best Balance: balance between high sensitivity and high specificity

The other option is to use the CINAHL Heading