CINAHL and MEDLINE are two databases of articles written by scholars and practicioners in the field of medicine and nursing.
CINAHL (Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature) Complete is the world’s most comprehensive source of full-text for nursing & allied health journals, providing full text for more than 1,300 journals indexed in CINAHL.
MEDLINE® provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. Created by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) indexing with tree numbers, tree hierarchy and explosion capabilities to search abstracts from over 4,800 current biomedical journals. Included are citations from Index Medicus, International Nursing Index, Index to Dental Literature, HISTLINE, SPACELINE, PREMEDLINE®, AIDSLINE®, BIOETHICSLINE®, and HealthSTAR®.
Search Strategy Development
1. Write the question.
Example 1--"prevention of bed sores in nursing homes"
Example 2--"nursing interventions in teen pregnancy"
2. Select the important terms to search
Example 1--prevention, pressure ulcers (more appropriate than bed sores), nursing homes
Example 2--nursing interventions, teen, adolescent, pregnancy
3. Consider possible points of focus such as language, date of publication, type of publication, etc.
4, Consider truncating. Most databases allow for finding variations of terms by using the symbol * in CINAHL. This ensures that variations of terms will appear--teen* will result in teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.
5. Consider Boolean searching--combining your terms with and, or, not. With Boolean Search, you place similar terms in paranthesis. See more on Boolean Searching.
Example 1: prevent* AND (pressure ulcers or bed sores) AND nursing homes
Example 2: nursing interventions AND (teen OR adolescent) AND pregnanc*
CINAHL Complete | PubMed |
Coverage: 1937 to date | Coverage: 1940’s to date |
Includes citations to journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, nurse practice acts, Evidence-Based Care Sheets, research instruments, etc. |
Includes only citations to journal articles |
Focus: nursing and allied health literature | Focus: biomedical literature |
Peer Review journal limit available | Not possible to identify peer reviewed journals |
Includes cited references at the end of many articles. (articles who have cited that one) |
Does not include cited references |
Indexes 5000 journals; full text for 1300 | Indexes 5500 journals; links to full text if free. |