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CINAHL for Finding Nursing Research

Many assignments will require you to find nursing research, meaning an article written by a nurse or nurses that details research (a study that was performed by the authors). CINAHL is a great database choice for this!

CINAHL's Advanced Search: Nursing Journals

In CINAHL's Advanced Search you'll find the checkbox option for Research Article. You'll also see a Journal Subset option. Use Journal Subset to select Nursing Journals, as nurses are most likely to publish in nursing journals.

CINAHL Screenshot highlighting Research Article checkbox and Journal Subset or Nursing, stating Select Research Article, Under Journal Subset select Nursing, It may be tempting to check the boxes for First or Any Author is Nurse, but lookout, CINAHL doe not do an optimal job of tagging these articles, and the tagging may be delayed so the most recent results may be a couple of years old.

As the image above states, ideally you won't use the First Author is Nurse or Any Author is Nurse checkboxes, as they will miss many nursing research articles.

 

How Do I Know if it's Nursing Research?

Once you're at your CINAHL results set, often the article title will be a good indicator that a study was performed, as will the abstract that is often available in the full record. After clicking on the Find It link for full text options, review the article webpage or PDF version of the article, as those will often have the author's credentials, and the full text will confirm if a study has been performed (research) as opposed to an article that is an overview, CEU, case report, editorial, etc.