Searching CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature)
What is CINAHL Complete?
CINAHL Complete provides access to the literature in nursing and allied health disciplines dating back to 1981. Over 2,900 journals are indexed including virtually all English language nursing journals along with selected titles in biomedicine, alternative therapies, and consumer health.
Getting Connected
Connect through the A-Z Databases
Basic Searching
Step 1: Enter Your Terms
Type your search terms into the search boxes on the Advanced screen. Choose the field(s) you want to search from the pull down menu(s).
Use the asterisk (*) to search word roots, e.g. "transplant*" retrieves transplant, transplants, or transplantation.
Step 2: Limit Your Results
Narrow your search to a lower number of more precise results by selecting desired Age Groups, Language, Publication Type, Peer Reviewed, Research Article, etc. from the options available below the search boxes, and click search.
You may not want to limit your results to Full Text. The Universtiy Libraries may have the full text available through another database and limiting to full text would exclude those results.
Note the Clinical Queries refinement which limits search retrieval to scientifically sound and clinically relevant study reports in five research areas: therapy, prognosis, review, qualitative and causation (etiology).
Step 3: Combining Searches/Search History
Click Clear next to the search boxes to remove the current search terms.
Click Search History and select the searches to combine by checking the boxes next to the searches you wish to combine. Choose the desired Boolean operator by clicking Search with AND or Search with OR.
Alternatively combine results by typing a search number into a new Search box, i.e., "s1 and s2" or "(keyword(s) and s1)", and click Search.
Viewing Results
Click on the article title for more information on that item.
Change the way all results are displayed using the Preferences tab in the upper right hand area of the page.
Click Save to enact changes.
If the full text of an article is contained within CINAHL with Full Text, images found from within the article, such as tables and figure, may reappear below the citation in the search results.
Find Full Text of Articles
Look for links to HTML or PDF Full Text below each citation.
If no direct link appears, Click 
to search for the article in another database. Be sure to search the USD Journal List for the journal before using Interlibrary Loan.
The information on this page has been adapted from "Searching CINAHL Plus: Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature" from the University of Washington Health Sciences Libraries.