50 Resources for Healthcare: 27. Looking for articles on Nursing Issues? Try Cinahl

The Cinahl database is the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature. It holds the bibliographic records of thousands of journals giving you access to many full-text articles and specialises in nursing and allied health related topics.

You can search across the database to find information about the topics you are researching.There are lots of features to help you to focus your search, including:

• Subject headings
• Patient focus limits like patient age or gender
• Date limit feature to limit to the date range that you need
• Publication type selection – for example so that you can concentrate on reviews, controlled trials or case reports and so on
• Search history to allow you to view your previous searches
• Search combinations to combine your searches using AND or OR to increase the focus of your search or expand your search to include more elements

You can find all the bibliographic information about the articles retrieved such as author, journal title, year of publication, volume and issue number, where relevant, and page number. This information helps you to locate the full-text and will be needed for your references.

Keele students can access the database via Ebsco whereas our NHS users can search the database via the HDAS interface. You will need either your Keele computer username / password or your NHS Athens username / password.

You can find more help using the Cinahl database via our Databases online guides section  and we also have a Using Cinahl etutorial to help you get started, which includes video demonstrations.