Neil John Maclean
Health Sciences Library
University of Manitoba
ph. 204-789-3342
healthlibrary@umanitoba.ca
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Searching CINAHL requires you to have an answerable research question and a well developed search strategy. If you don't have these you may wish to review:
Basic searching in CINAHL is as simple as adding in a few words or phrases into the search box.
Basic searching requires an understanding of keyword searching, boolean operators and some search techniques:
Searching with keywords:
Searching with more than one keyword
If you are using more than one keyword you need to consider how to combine the keywords to get the items you want. You do this with boolean operators. When using boolean operators you may also need to consider using brackets for your search to help control when those operations are done.
Controlling keyword searches
What if you only want to look for keywords in specific parts of the item record? Each part of the item record is known as a field. You can focus your search by only looking for keywords in the title field or in the title and abstract fields. This is known as Field Searching.
There are two ways to combine concepts in CINAHL.
For a search on the topic of "What is the risk of mortality due to cell phone use in distracted teen drivers?" we might want to search the concepts of mortality, cell phone, distracted driving, and teens.
Each group of terms for a particular concept are entered together and searched separately.
mortal* OR fatal* OR death
"cell phone*" OR "cellular phone*" OR "mobile phone*" OR smartphone* OR cellphone*
"distracted driv*" OR "driving while distracted" OR "inattentive driv*"
teen* or adolescen* or youth or young
Enter this search into CINAHL:
Combining keyword concepts using Brackets
For less complex searches you can use brackets to help you combine searches all on one line.
Search for a known article in CINAHL:
Searching for a known article requires an understanding of