Health Sciences Database Literature Searching CINAHL Plus with Full Text

CINAHL Subject Headings
CINAHL Subject Headings are comparable to MeSH terms for PubMed. They are the controlled vocabulary/thesaurus for the CINAHL database. Articles within CINAHL are categorized using multiple Subject Headings that correlate with the main subjects of articles. The use of Subject Headings makes searching more efficient and accurate.

To search for Subject Headings from the CINAHL homepage, click on the CINAHL Subject Headings tab on the upper left side of the page.

Combine multiple concepts into one search using the search history feature along with Subject Headings. Example: Quality Improvement and Hand Off (Patient Safety) Subject Headings. (Video will demonstrate how to locate these two subject headings, and how to combine them into one search.)
 

Example Research Question in PICOT format: 

Search strategies: 
Search using Subject Headings only - (MH "Quality Improvement") AND (MH "Hand Off (Patient Safety)")

More advanced search using keywords and Subject Headings: (MH "Quality Improvement" OR quality-improvement*) AND (MH "Hand Off (Patient Safety)" OR patient-hando* OR patient-hand-o* OR clinical-hando* OR clinical-hand-o*)

Use an asterisk at the end of a word to search for alternative endings of the word (this is called truncation).  For example, patient-hando* will search the database for “patient handoff,” patient handoffs,” “patient handover,” and “patient handovers.”

To search phrases, use a dash between each word. For example, quality-improvement will search for only the phrase “quality improvement” and not the words “quality” or “improvement” by themselves.