NRSG 386 

Searching CINAHL (3 min)

Print and save results (1 min 20 sec)

Get full-text (2 min 40 sec)

Most of the information for your topic will come from CINAHL and MEDLINE

Links to CINAHL and MEDLINE via EBSCO are on the main library website, as well as in the Home tab of this tutorial. MEDLINE is also available in another interface, PubMed, but the procedures for searching are different, so you are encouraged to use EBSCO MEDLINE for these assignments.

Our topic:  Positioning of the patient for the prevention pressure sores.

Search strategy:  It's kind of like diagramming sentences. Pick out the main terms from your topic by first identifying the nouns and then look at any of the other terms that look important and necessary.

• positioning
• prevention
• pressure sores

You may have to play around with synonyms or add/delete terms as you go about your search. You will only pull up articles in which your search terms appear. That's why synonyms can be important. If you use synonyms, combine them in the same search box or within parenthesis with OR.

The variations of a word can also make or break your search strategy. If you just used the word prevention, you would miss our on any article records that used the word variations prevent or prevented. Avoid this situation by using truncation. Add an asterick after the word stem:

• position*
• prevent*
  

1.  Enter each individual search concept into its own search box. Below the search boxes, you see various methods to limit your results. The only limits to use at this point are Peer Reviewed, English, and Exclude MEDLINE.  By Excluding MEDLINE results, you will avoid duplication and save time when you search MEDLINE. Avoid limiting to age, sex, etc. until you run your search.  Sometimes it is unnecessary to use these limits options.

2.  Once you've entered all of your search terms and selected limits, click the Search button.

3.  We did not retrieve many results. You can improve your search strategy by finding an article that discusses your topic. Click the title of the article to open the entire record. 

4.  When the full record is revealed, you can see the subject headings that were assigned to the article. By finding out how CINAHL/MEDLINE categorize concepts, you can learn to speak their language and improve your search results. In this record, you can see that Patient Positioning is used. You could add that to your search, but in this case, we have the term  position* in our strategy, so it probably isn't necessary.  However, notice that CINAHL uses Pressure Ulcer, not Pressure Sore.

5.  We should add Pressure Ulcer to our strategy because that is the term that will be associated with the articles we want to see.

6. As you can see, by revising our search strategy with the terminology used by CINAHL (in this case, a synonym) you can improve your results. If you need to add more limits to your results, you can do so by clickingi the Search Options link.

7. Now it is time to go through your results. You can access the library's full-text journal collection through your results. To learn how to do that, visit the Full-Text Journals tab in this tutorial.

8.  Once you have finished searching CINAHL, you can easily move over to MEDLINE by clicking the Choose Databases link, unselecting CINAHL and selecting MEDLINE.

9. Now in MEDLINE and your CINAHL search strategy saved, you can run your search immediately. Please note that limits are different in MEDLINE and you may need to use the same techniques of finding MEDLINE subject terminology as we did in CINAHL if your results are not satisfactory.

Search CINAHL or MEDLINE now