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CINAHL (Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health) is an EBSCO host database containing more than 1,400 full- text and 5,400 indexed journals. It features peer-reviewed articles and dissertations, as well as evidence-based practice care sheets.
One of the best features of CINAHL is how intuitive and easy it is to use. The opening screen consists of three sections:
This section has search boxes for terms to be entered. On the left, you can add terms together using Boolean operators; on the right you can select what fields you wish to search. (Read through the Search Skills pages in this guide for more on field searches and Boolean operators.)
The limiter options are used to limit results by specific criteria, e.g., to certain publication years, English language results, type of publication, etc.
You can also select "Full Text" if you want to see only those results that have full text, BUT, doing this means you are missing on all of the entries that are citations only, some of which might lead to your perfect article. You can always search for the article title in TWUniversal to see if we have access to the article through another database; if we don't, it can always be requested through Interlibrary Loan.
These options are both checkboxes next to the subject heading(s) you've chosen.
CINAHL offers evidence-based care sheets — concise summaries of many conditions and their treatment. To search for these exclusively, click on the "Evidence-Based Care Sheets" tab at the top of the screen.
You can browse through all of their EBP care sheets or enter a search term to find a specific topic.
These care sheets give an overview of a condition (What We Know), as well as common treatment approaches for healthcare providers (What We Can Do).
When you build your search, if you select the "Full-text "option on the limiters, then all the produced articles should have accompanying full text.
Search results will usually have the option to read the resource in your browser (HTML Full Text) or to download it as a PDF (PDF Full Text).
If you did not select the "Full-text" option in the limiters, then you may have some citation results that do not have the accompanying full text. In this case, where there is no full text available directly from CINAHL, you should select the "Find It @ TWU" option. This will take you to a search for the title in TWUniversal.
Here you can see that TWU has the full text for the desired article through the Elsevier ScienceDirect Complete Freedom Collection database. Click on the link to the database to be taken to the full text.
If TWU does not have direct access to the full text, then you can submit an Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Request. The link for this is provided on the bottom of the page.
To learn more about using RefWorks, visit its page in this guide under Citation Managers.