Introduction
CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature) is an index database covering journal articles back to 1982 from the fields of nursing and allied health. To find CINAHL, go to the Brown Library home page and click on "Databases." You now come to a list of our most popular databases. At the top of the alphabetical list, you see "CINAHL." Click there.

Search Screen

We are now on the search screen for Advanced searching. This is the default search screen. At the top of the screen are folder tabs for different types of searches. The current tab is always green, the rest blue. There are more search options below the folder tabs. They are Keyword, Publication, CINAHL Headings, Cited References, and Index. The current option will be in yellow print, the rest in white print.

In the middle of the screen, you have three search boxes. The extra search boxes allow you to search multiple topics at one time. For example, you can search on Parkinson Disease as one topic and depression as a second topic. After each search box you have a drop down box allowing you to select the fields you want to search in. These fields include author, title, abstract, subject, and text, among others. Selecting a field is optional.

Beneath the search boxes is another drop down box. Use this box to select the database you would like to search in. The current database is CINAHL.

Beneath the database selection box you have a large screen area for limiting your search. Some choices are Linked Full Text, Publication Year, and Author. Be aware that when you choose to limit your search you will get fewer results.

Let's do a keyword search on parkinson disease in CINAHL limiting the results to Linked Full Text.

Search Results Screen

On this results screen you see 19 full-text articles. Each article reference has three lines. On the first line, you see basic citation information for the article. This information includes author, article title, journal title, date, volume, issue, and pages. Sometimes you will see an abstract. Article number six is an example of one with an abstract.

The article title is highlighted and underlined in blue. Clicking there will take you to another screen with additional information about the article, but will not take you to the full-text of the article itself.

On the second line of the article reference you may see Adobe PDF icon. When you see this icon, you know you have a full-text article provided directly through the CINAHL database. Here, all the articles have this icon and are full-text. This is because when we searched for Parkinson Disease earlier, we limited our search to linked full-text.

On the bottom line of the article reference, you see the icon. All articles will have this icon. Use LincIt to see if articles are available in full text in the OVID database or in database collections such as Blackwell, Cambridge and Gale. We do not need to this for this search because all the articles are already full-text, but we will do another search later to see how LincIt works.

For now, let's look at article #6 titled "Efficacy of Multidisciplinary Treatment Program.." Click on the PDF icon.

Full-text Article Screen (CINAHL)

We are now looking at a PDF image for a full-text article. To view PDF articles, you must have Adobe Acrobat loaded on your computer. This software is free and available through the Adobe website at www.adobe.com. To print this article, format it first by clicking on the printer icon located in the tool bar at the top of the article. Let's go back to the search results screen.

Look at the folder tabs located in the middle of the screen underneath the search boxes and above the search results. See the red check mark? Next to it, you see the words "Limiters set." We see this because we limited our search to full-text. When we did that, we got 19 results. That's not very many articles at all. Let's refine our search to find more articles. Click the folder tab labeled "Refine Search."

We now come back to the original search screen with our search topic already entered in the search box and the "Linked Full Text" box already checked. Let's uncheck that box and search again.

Full-text Articles through LincIt

This time instead of 19 articles we find 2,819. What a difference! Look at this first list of ten. None of them have the PDF icon. What happened to our articles with PDF? Those articles are still there, but buried in the large pile. To find the first one of those original articles, we would have to scroll through 14 pages of results. It is at article #140. However, we do not need to do this. There are more full-text articles than you see at first glance. In addition to the PDF articles available through CINAHL, we also have links to full-text articles available in OVID or in other database collections such as Blackwell, Cambridge, and Gale. To find out if an article is available full-text through one of these other databases, click on the LincIt icon.

MetaLinc Services

When we click on LincIt for article #1, we go to the MetaLinc Services screen. Here we see that there is no full-text available for the item. Clicking on LincIt is no guarantee of full-text. In fact, for most references we will not see full text. If you look further, you will see that articles #2, #3,#5, and #8 are also not full text.

Gale

When we click on LincIt for article #4, which is an article that appeared in March 14, 2007 issue of a periodical titled Nursing Standard, we move out of CINAHL and into the Academic OneFile database provided by Gale. This occurs because LincIt "knows" that Academic OneFile provides the full text of the that issue of Nursing Standard, whereas the full text is not present in CINAHL itself. Above you see the results list for all the articles that appeared in that issue of Nursing Standard. The seventh one is the one originally referenced in CINAHL. Click on the title highlighted and underlined in blue to see the full article. Close the Gale window to return to our results screen. If you look further, you will see that articles #6 and #9 are also available full-text through Gale.

OVID

When we click on LincIt for article #10, "Elevated Levels of Dietary Copper...," a window opens with the full text of this article from the OVID database. On the right side of this window notice that there is an additional link labeled "Full Text (PDF)." This link provides an additional version of the full text, showing exactly the way the article looked as it first appeared in print. Close the OVID window to return to our results screen.

Blackwell Synergy

When we click on LincIt for article #56, we move out of CINAHL and into the Blackwell Synergy database. A new window opens and we see the abstract for the article. To see the full text, click on either the HTML or PDF links located on the right side of the window.

To summarize: of the first ten articles on Parkinson disease in CINAHL, four are full-text. Three are full-text through Gale and one is full-text through OVID. When we looked a little deeper, we found a few scattered articles from Blackwell Synergy and even a few articles directly available through CINAHL.

Interlibrary Loan
While CINAHL does not provide very many full-text articles, it is still a very useful database. In fact, no comprehensive review of the nursing literature would be complete without it. As an index database, CINAHL points you to the literature and then you have to find it from there. You can find it! Any article not available full-text or on the shelves at Brown Library can be obtained for you from a library that does own it. This service is called interlibrary loan. For more information, please visit the library home page and click on the "Interlibrary Loan" link.

MLA Citation
Here are two sample MLA citations for articles found using CINHAL.

Example of full-text article found in CINAHL

Carne, W., et al. "Efficacy of Multidisciplinary Treatment Program on Long-Term Outcomes of Individuals with Parkinson's Disease." Journal of Rehabilitation Research & Development 42:6 (2005): 779-86. CINAHL. EBSCOhost. Virginia Western Community Coll., Brown Lib., Roanoke. 8 May 2007 <http://search.ebscohost.com>.

Example of a full-text article found after being directed from CINAHL to OVID.

Brewer, George J. "Elevated Levels of Dietary Copper May Accelerate Cognitive Decline and Hasten the Onset of Alzheimer Disease." Nutrition & the M.D. 33.2 (2007): 33+. OVID. Virginia Western Community Coll., Brown Lib., Roanoke. 8 May 2007 <http://gateway.ut.ovid.com>.