The Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL Plus) focuses on nursing, biomedicine, alternative/complementary medicine, and consumer health. The EBSCO-hosted database contains nearly 7.6 million records, indexed from over 5,500 journals dating back to the 1930s. The documentation on this page references the EBSCOhost version of this database.
Health sciences incorporates a lot of specialized terminology, and the same thing can be referred to with several different terms.
For example: The concept of stroke, could be referred to as stroke, cerebrovascular accident, or CVA.
CINAHL contains a resource called “CINAHL Subject Headings” which is a controlled vocabulary.
This feature allows you to find out which term the database "prefers," as well as construct a search from those preferred terms and subheadings. You can also understand where your concept fits in with other medical concepts.
"Explode" broadens your search and gets you more results. Selecting "Explode" retrieves all citations about the CINAHL Heading, as well as all citations about more narrower (or specific) term(s).
In the example to the right, selecting "Explode" for "Patient Safety" will retrieve articles on patient safety and on all of the different types of patient safety issues listed below it.
"Major Concept" narrows your search and gets you less results. Selecting "Major Concept" retrieves citations for articles and publications where the CINAHL Heading is a main focus.
CINAHL typically assign three to four major concept headings to each publication.
Subheadings narrow your search and gets you less results. Subheadings allow you to indicate specific aspects of the CINAHL heading that are of interest. For example: the economic aspects of patient safety.