CINAHL Search Tutorial Guide[1]
CINAHL is a powerful database capable of retrieving large amounts of information on nursing and allied health-related subjects. These tutorials demonstrate the most-useful features of CINAHL. Look at the description of the tutorials and choose the ones you feel will best meet your needs.All the tutorials have sound, so if you want to listen to the narration, use speakers or headphones. Depending on the size of your computer screen, you may need to use the scroll bars to position the page on your screen.
Basic Search[ PDF ]
The basic search feature searches CINAHL in a manner similar to a Google search. It’s adequate for quick, simple searches. However, if you are going to use CINAHL for research purposes, you should look at the CINAHL Headings and Advanced Search tutorials. They show you how to use the power of CINAHL to get good results.
CINAHL Headings
The key to using CINAHL well is using CINAHL Headings. They are descriptive terms that medical librarians have attached to articles indexed in CINAHL. For example, rather than searching for “heart attack” CINAHL Headings point you to the more medically acceptable term “myocardial infarction.” The result is more consistent search outcomes.
Advanced Search
This allows you to create very specific searches.
The Advanced Search tutorial covers the following:
• The advanced keyword search options
• Truncation
• Limiting searches
• Saving and exporting searches
Advanced Search Options [ PDF ]
This explains some of the less-used advanced search options. It downloads and opens a PDF file.
Managing Research
If you are working on a major research project, or on research that extends over a longer period of time, CINAHL offers a number of tools that will help you manage your research. Learning to use these tools takes some time, but it is worth it because your research will be more systematic and complete.
Print, E-mail, Save
These functions make it easier for you to manage your search results. You can save searches and search results, share results with others, and export your results to bibliographic management software such as RefWorks or Endnote.
Managing Searches
Managing searches helps you to save and review your search history, something that’s important if you’re doing systematic searching and want to see which searches you’ve already run.
Managing Folders
Folders are very useful for maintaining a collection of shared resources when doing collaborative research. Although the folders are maintained by one person, they can be accessed by other researches who are invited by the primary researcher. Note that researchers from other institutions will be able to access the full text of only those articles through which they have access at their home institutions.
Alerts -- Full ( includes demo search) Short (alerts only)
The CINAHL Alerts tutorial shows you how to set up e-mail and/or RSS feed alerts for searches you have done in CINAHL. It is also possible to create journal alerts that will send you the table of contents when a new issue is published.
The advantage of setting up an alert is that if a new article is published that fits your search parameters, you'll be notified when it is available.
Cited References (Search)
You use a “cited reference” search when you want to know how often other scholars have referred to the article in question. A “cited reference” search shows you the number of times the article has been cited, by whom, and in what journal. It is helpful to know if an article is frequently cited since that usually indicates its value. It is also a good way to find other, more recent articles on the same topic.
Indexes
Indexes provide a useful way of searching within a selected journal subset. For example, if you are looking for a complete list of articles published by an author, using the Author subset is an effective way. Another example would be searching for “malaria” within the Africa Journal Subset. However, if you are doing an exhaustive search, it would not be wise to rely completely on an index search, as it’s likely that journals outside the Africa Journal subset will have information on malaria in Africa.
Publications
The Publications tab allows us to browse or search specific journals indexed by CINAHL.
This tutorial covers browsing publications:
- Alphabetical
- By Subject & Description
- Match Any Words
Visual Search
Visual search allows you to narrow your search by adding terms from recognition rather than memory. It is a good way of exploring an unfamiliar subject, but it takes a lot of screen space, so you may find it frustrating to use if you have a small monitor.
[1] Rather than create one long tutorial for CINAHL, I’ve chosen to break it into a number of shorter tutorials, which allows users to choose exactly what they want to know how to do. The descriptions included provide guidance so they know what’s in a tutorial before opening it. I use this page as an introduction to CINAHL and have the titles linked to the tutorials they describe. Some of the tutorials also have PDF versions and some have a long version with an example search or a short version that is only the basic function being described. For an example of how we’ve implemented our set of CINAHL tutorials see,