CINAHL Quick Guide

CINAHL Quick Start video (YouTube)

Begin Transcript

Visual: Library homepage

Narration: CINAHL Plus with full text is a great resource for finding nursing research literature. Starting from the library home page, library.waldenu.edu.

Visual: Databases A-Z page

If you know which database you want to search, you can go straight to "Databases A to Z" here. Select C for CINAHL, and click on the CINAHL plus with full text. CINAHL for the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature. And we default to this advance search screen with three search boxes.

Visual: CINAHL search page

Narration: You want to examine and separate the major concepts of your research question. For example, if you are searching childhood obesity, you want to put obesity in the first box and put a child in a separate box. You can limit your search from the get go by going down to this limit your results section. For a discussion post, you want to keep this full text box checked because that will only find things that are available within the Walden library. You'll also want to check the peer reviewed scholarly journals and to specify a start year so that you can limit it to the last five years.

Visual: Database results page

Narration: Scroll up and hit the Search button. And you'll see that we have 6,761 articles in our hit list. It can be helpful to review the subject headings associated with these articles to see if there are any terms that you might use instead, for instance pediatric instead of child. As you examine your hit list, you can see the full details of any particular article by clicking the title of the article. Now, to see the full text of the article itself, click on "PDF Full Text" and the PDF will open with in the browser window here.

Visual: PDF viewer

Narration: Now, you may have a print button in your browser and there is a print button over here in the database. But you want to use the Print button in the PDF window or the Download button if you just want to download the article to your hard drive. There is one useful button on the right side here. It's the cite button that will produce an APA citation for you, so that you can copy and paste it where you need it. Now, you can use the Back button to go back to our search screen and apply more limits. For example, if I put in sugar, it'll take us from 6,000 hits to 312, and that may focus your topic further.

Created April 2020 by Walden University Library