Introducing CINAHL (With Full Text)
CINAHL, standing for Cumulated Index in Nursing and Allied Health Literature, is one of our most popular databases used widely among school of health and social care students within our student community at Napier. It covers literature on various areas of healthcare including nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, dietetics, nutrition and many more health-related professions. The research database itself is very comprehensive and offers the full texts of various nursing and allied health journals. Some additional online resources which CINAHL also contains ranges from a variety of quick lessons, ongoing education modules and full-text evidence-based care sheets.
Who uses, and would benefit from using CINAHL?…
CINAHL is one of the key databases utilised by SHSC (School of Health and Social Care) students and academics at Edinburgh Napier University. The most frequent users of this specific database are nurses (including nursing students), allied health professionals, nurse educators and researchers. CINAHL Ultimate is also used widely by nursing students to learn about specific healthcare techniques and practices through the instructional videos it offers, as well as to improve their knowledge of best practices and procedures when caring for patients. So not only does CINAHL offer a range of helpful resources that can be used for written assignments – it’s wide variety of instructional videos and tutorials, guides and lessons can also offer our SHSC students a range of useful advice and information that can be applied when on placements and further on into their careers in healthcare.
Pros of using CINAHL…
One of the ways in which CINAHL surpasses other databases is by offering full-text access to a considerable amount of the most consistently cited journals, along with thorough curation and indexing of these open-access journals. In total, CINAHL contains just over 1,300 journals featuring searchable citations and references. Because it is a targeted resource which specialises in healthcare, you can find a range of very specific scholarly material about Nursing and Allied Health as well, meaning search results have a significantly higher change of being diverse and relevant. Some other benefits of using CINAHL include:
- The user-friendly and accessible interface of CINAHL makes it easy for uses to make effective searches to retrieve relevant information about specific healthcare topics and subjects.
- The structure of the Medical Subject headings (MeSH) which the National Library of Medicine uses is also implemented by CINAHL Subject Headings, which enables researchers to come across newer subjects such as social distancing, vaping and COVID-19.
- Search results are usually of a very high quality as they are indexed with great care and with accuracy and sophistication in mind once put through a thorough validation and certification process.
- With its comprehensive indexing and the precision and directness of CINAHL’s full text linking, users can quickly and efficiently build up a relevant search criterion and find a wide variety of related search results with ease.
- Qualitative as well as quantitative studies are covered and included in the CINAHL database, as well as a variety of nursing and healthcare subjects such as occupational therapy. Materials are extremely diverse and varied.
- Since it is primarily focused on academic sources and literature on nursing and allied health, this eliminates the possibility of generating any search results which are completely irrelevant to these subject areas and topics.
More information…
Not only does our Libguide feature a direct link to the CINAHL database – it comes with both written guidance and recorded, visual tutorials on how to effectively utilise nursing and allied health databases such as CINAHL and their different search features and functions. This includes both a virtual, recorded tutorial on conducting basic and advanced searches within these databases. Find out more in our LibGuide.
By Rachel Downie
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