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CINAHL Complete: Search Tips

An index of over 3,000 journals on nursing and related fields such as consumer health, alternative/complementary medicine, health science librarianship, biomedicine, and more...

Search Tips

These are a number of tricks you can use to enhance your CINAHL searches and help you to find information you need for research.

  • Use Boolean Operators and parentheses to build your search
  • Use truncation to broaden your search
  • Use phrase searching to limit your search
  • Use limits to narrow your search

Knowing how to use searching techniques will help narrow or broaden your search when a topic is too limited.

Boolean Operators

Boolean Operators link concepts and are used to broaden or narrow search:

AND - finds results with your all search terms. AND narrows your search (i.e. get fewer citations)

OR - finds results with any of your search terms. Or broadens your search (i.e. get more results)

NOT - finds results with only one of your search terms. NOT narrorws your search (i.e. get fewer citations).

For more help, refer to Boolean Operators guide to get detailed information.

Truncation

Truncation is a search method in which symbols are used in place of letters or words. The purpose of truncation is to help broaden the search (i.e. helps get more citations).

See below how it works:

In CINAHL, the asterisk (*) represents any group of characters, including no character. Use * symbol at the end of the root term.

Example:  prevent* finds prevent, preventative, prevented, preventing, etc., or smoke* finds smoke, smoker, smoking, etc.

 

Phrase Searching

Searching for phrases narrows your search (i.e. gets fewer citations). See below:

In CINAHL, enclose the phrase using double quotation marks (i.e. "shift handoff") in order to find citations that have those words in the exact order.

Examples:

  • shift handoff - finds 61 citations, "shift handoff" finds 18 citations
     
  • patient falls - finds 2,619 citations, "patient falls" finds 483 citations

 

 

Limits

Limits allows you to restrict searches to your specific topic. For example, you may want to limit to English language, articles published within the last 5 years. CINAHL allows you to limit your topic searches.

Some other limiters would be:

  • age specific
  • population groups
  • article types
  • plus so much more.