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How to search CINAHL

Gathering citations

As you identify citations that are of interest to your research you can add them to a folder in CINAHL.  This acts as a temporary holding place for citations.  Your search session times out after 15 minutes of inactivity and all citations in the temporary folder are lost.  So remember to export your citations before this happens.

To add citation to your temporary folder:

  1. Scroll through the results list and identify citations you'd like to download. Click on the Folder (icon) to the right of the article title.

a screen capture of a cinahl citation highlighting the location of the folder icon

You know when a citation has been added to your temporary folder when it changes shape to look like a folder with papers in it.

screen capture of a cinahl citation showing the folder with papers in it icon
 

Access your CINAHL temporary folder:

You can find your temporary folder and contents at the top of the CINAHL page. Click on the folder to view the contents and to download the citations.

screen capture showing the folder located at the top of all CINAHL pages.

Exporting citations

You can export citation(s) from the folder using various formats in CINAHL. Export formats in CINAHL include:

  • Direct Export in RIS Format (e.g. CITAVI, EasyBib, EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, Zotero)
  • Citations in BibTeX format
  • Download CSV

The most commonly used format is RIS (which can also be used by Mendeley).

To export in RIS format:

  1. In the temporary folder (described above), select a single citation by clicking on the check box next to that citation OR click the check box next to Select / deselect all to select all the citations in the folder.
  2. Click Export (on the right hand side of the screen).
  3. The default is RIS export but others might be selected if preferred.
  4. Click Save. 
  5. Your device will prompt you where to save the RIS file to.

screen capture showing steps 1-2 described above

screen capture showing steps 3-4 above

Export limits

For evidence and knowledge synthesis searches (eg. systematic reviews and scoping reviews) often a large results must be downloaded for screening and data extraction.  There are two approaches for downloading large amounts of citations from CINAHL.

Using the export link (up to 25,0000 maximum)
  • click on Share and select the E-mail a link to download exported results (up to 25000) (link)
  • for more than 25,000 results, reduce your results into distinct sets that are less than 25,000 (e.g. by date range)
  • Note: there may be a delay between when you "send" the link and when you receive it in your inbox. 

Folder export (up to 1,500 maximum)

  • Add items to a folder, page by page, and export from there.
  • Be sure to view the maximum # of citations per page (50) to make things go faster.

 If you are working on a project like this you may want to talk to a librarian.

CINAHL & Mendeley

There are two ways to get CINAHL citations into Mendeley:

CINAHL & Zotero

There are two ways to get CINAHL citations into Zotero: