This guide will show you how to use CINAHL Complete to find journal articles for your assignments. CINAHL Complete provides access to literature in nursing and 17 allied health disciplines from 1937 to present. CINAHL Complete indexes over 5,000 journal in the nursing field and health related fields. It also offers access to full-text and abstracted articles, evidence-based care sheets, and more.

Many of the things you learn from this guide can be used in our other library databases. You will be given search strategies, and other helpful hints, for searching in CINAHL Complete before starting your own searching.

To find CINAHL Complete on our website, click on the toolbar and select Research, from the drop-down menu select Resouces and then click on the red button Resources by Subject. Select Nursing to get to the Nursing Page that lists all our databases, guides and contact information for nursing resources.

Scroll down the screen until you reach CINAHL Complete. Then click on "Click here to access CINAHL Complete".

CINAHL Complete defaults to the "Advanced Search" screen. Here you can limit your search with many options:

• Peer Reviewed - limits search to scholarly journal articles
• Published Date - limits date range of your search (3 years, 5 years)
  
• Any Author is Nurse - limits to Nurse authored articles
  

• Publication Type - limits to certain types of articles, such as case studies, care plans, clinical trials and nursing interventions

• Special Interest - limits to a particular field or subject, such as evidence based practice

You can also limit your search by sex of participant, age group or geographical area.

Keywords are the words you enter into a database or search engine to find information on a topic. You only want to use the main points of the topic as your keywords.

Keywords are critical for effective database searching. They...

• help you focus on a topic.
• help you focus your research.
• eliminate extraneous articles.
• are better for Internet searching too.
  

Now some quick search tips when using CINAHL Complete or our other databases:

• Use academic or professional language when you are conducting research in order to find the most scholarly materials on your topic.
• Avoid unnecessary words like effect, affect, study, research or journal when searching library databases.
• Put quotation marks around your words to search as an exact phrase
  • “nursing interventions“
• Use an asterisk to search for words with similar endings.
  • teen* would find teen, teens, teenage, teenager, teenaged.
• Use a question mark or hashtag symbol to search for similarly spelled words at the same time
  • woman and women (wom#n, wom?n).
  • Databases tend to use the question mark; search engines the hashtag symbol.

• Use AND to combine main keywords together.
  • “nursing shortage“ AND hospitals
• Use OR to search for two words or more that can be used interchangeably.
  • neonate OR infant OR newborn
    
• Use NOT to eliminate a word or topic from your search.
  • vaccines NOT autism

CINAHL Complete has a “controlled vocabulary” to make searching the database easier. Using keywords you need to think of all terms that describe the subject and then use “OR” to get all relevant terms for your search.

Subject Headings are the terms that are assigned to articles by the staff at CINAHL Complete . The Subject Headings are consistently used to describe the same concept, so you don’t need to think of all the terms as in a keyword search.

Using Subject Headings has some advantages:

• Select your concept as a “major” idea
• Select subheadings of a Subject Heading
  
• Read a scope note that describes the Subject Heading
  
• Add other concepts to the Subject Heading.

Click on the link "Using the CINAHL/MeSH" below to view a video demonstration of Subject Heading searching.

A journal article contains an abstract, plus the full article and references at the end. There are also often datasets, charts and graphs within the article. Most instructors want you to find scholarly articles for your research. Click here to find out more about what a scholarly article is.

Your instructors want full text journal articles not abstracts.

• Articles in HTML Full Text look like a webpage. These have great features:
• a translator from English to another language
• text-to-speech reading of the article
• Articles in PDF Full Text look like a scan of the original article in the printed journal.

You may also be redirected to a page advising you the article is not available in our databases.

Within the ILL Request Form:

• Enter your contact information
• Enter the year the article was published
• Scroll down and press Submit
  

Most articles are delivered to your Trocaire College email in 2 - 72 hours. If it will take longer than that, we will contact you.