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NGR 6813 - Evidence Based Nursing Practice: 2. CINAHL

CINAHL

All of the databases are accessible from the Articles & Databases page. http://library.ucf.edu/Databases

All databases require remote access through the library’s EZProxy. http://library.ucf.edu/Databases/OffCampus.asp

General Information:

CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) provides indexing for over 3,802 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health, including publications from the National League for Nursing and the American Nurses’ Association. CINAHL is considered the major nursing database containing more than 1,000,000 records dating back to 1937. CINAHL contains the full text of hundreds of journals, plus access to health care books, dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of practice and book chapters. Legal cases, clinical innovations, critical paths, drug records, research instruments and clinical trials are also included.

Search Tips:

Sign in to MyEBSCOhost at the top of the search screen to create your own login. Signing in will allow you to save your results into a folder or save your search strategy and retrieve these after you’ve closed CINAHL.

Use Boolean search operators AND, OR, or NOT to link your search words together.

If you enter a phrase, it will be searched with AND. (heart failure = heart AND failure). If you check Boolean/Phrase below the search boxes, the words will be searched as a phrase (words adjacent to each other). Enclosing a phrase in quotes will also make the database search the words adjacent to each other.

Once an initial search is done, use any relevant subjects suggested on the left side of the screen to further narrow your topic.

Use the asterisk to search for variations of words. For example, typing educat* as a search term will search for every variation of the word ‘education’, educating, educator, educated, etc. Place the asterisk where the variation of the word begins.

Never limit your search to Full Text only. Remember that clicking on full text may exclude citations where full text is available in another database (one not provided by EBSCOhost) that can be identified by clicking on the "Get Full Text" icon.

Check the "Peer Reviewed" option if you only want to locate scholarly journals.

To limit your search to nursing research articles, click the “Research Article” check box, and change the Journal Subset to “Nursing”.

Explore the Publication Types list. You can limit your search to Journal Articles, as well as Care Plans, Case Studies, Nurse Practice Acts, and Practice Guidelines.

You can also limit your search by publication date, language, gender, age groups, continuing education (CE) modules, evidence-based practice, and articles that deal specifically with pregnancy, inpatients, or outpatients.

You can expand your search by checking the boxes to search for related terms and searching within the full text of articles.

You can email articles to yourself. Either click on the Add to Folder link and email the folder of articles or click on the "E-mail" icon at the top of the full text article you are viewing to email a single article.

Click on the "Get Full Text" icon to locate the full text of the article online if a full text link is not apparent. 

For More Help:

Refer to the ‘Help’ screens found within the database for more information about how to search CINAHL. Help is located in the top right corner of all CINAHL screens.

You may also seek help from the Ask a Librarian service. For hours of operation and phone numbers: http://library.ucf.edu/Ask. A toll free phone number is available.