This video will show you how to do evidence based research in the CINAHL database. At the library homepage, click on resources. There'll be a dropdown tab and you'll want to select databases. From the alphabetical list, find the CINAHL Plus with full text link. Or under all subjects, select health professions. CINAHL will be under the letter C. This is the major research database in the nursing field. To enter the database, click on the database name. If you are off campus, you may be prompted to log in. For evidence based research, we will use the advanced search page. This screen makes it easy to type in more complex combinations of keywords than we would use for a basic search. Here's an example research question. In patients with Crohn's Disease, does taking probiotics help with remission or lessening of symptoms? If we aren't sure whether we should use Crohn or Crohn's with the apostrophe, we can just type in Crohn* disease with an asterisk. That will tell the search engine to look for variant endings of a word. This trick works well in most databases.
We also may want to type in similar or related words in order to expand our search. In this example, inflammatory bowel disease is a broader term than Crohn's Disease, but articles about that topic may mention or be applicable to Crohn's Disease. The word or, placed between the words, tells the search engine to retrieve articles with either word. In the next line, we can add another term from our research question, probiotics. If we wish, we can also type in similar words with the word or between them. For example, probiotics or lactobacillus. Notice that the pull down menu is set to the connector and. This means that we are telling the search engine to search for articles that have a combination of words in the first line, plus the word on the second line. We could add a term on the third line, such as remission or symptoms, but usually this isn't necessary unless there is a great deal of research available on a topic. Before you click on search, scroll down to the database limiters.
These limiters allow us to refine our search further. You may want to add a date range, such as 2010 to 2020, to get the last 10 years of research. Checking the box next to the peer reviewed will get you most scholarly journals. There are two limiters that you probably don't want to use for major research reviews. First, do not check the full text limiter. It will limit your research too much. Instead, you should rely on inter library loan for items not available online in the databases. There's also an evidence based practice checkbox. This will limit your search to evidence-based reviews. Do not use it if you also want primary research articles. Finally, in general, you shouldn't check too many limiters, because it will restrict your search too much. Now click on search. Our search has retrieved over 300 results. Notice each article and its uniqueness.
Some articles may be in English while others may not. You will often find non-English articles referenced in databases, and generally they are not available translated into English. The fourth article down is a primary research study. You can tell this by holding your mouse over the small icon next to the title to look at the abstract. The authors have summarized their purpose and methods for conducting their research. To see a more detailed summary, click on the title. Notice the major and minor subject headings. You can use them for ideas for other terms you might want to search. We will also talk more about subject headings later in this video. Sometimes you'll be able to tell from the abstract, whether the article is relevant to your own research topic. But other times such as with this one, you might need to read the full article. Notice there is no full text link to this article. This means that the article is not available in full text from CINAHL. When this happens, you should click the request through inter library loan link to request the item from inter library loan.
The second article is a systematic review, a summary and analysis of the research that has been done on a topic. It is not considered primary research, but you can use it for background information and to identify primary research studies that have been done on your topic that you might want to include in your own review. The full text of this article is available through the PDF full-text link. Now that we have gone through advanced keyword searching, let's learn how to use the CINAHL headings for a different kind of search. Click on new search, and then advanced search to start over. Click on the CINAHL subject headings link to browse for subjects. CINAHL has a very organized and detailed list of subjects that they assign to articles when adding them to the database. When keyword searching isn't effective, sometimes searching the official subject headings can be useful.
Remember in our earlier example that we weren't sure about the spelling of Crohn's Disease. Let's search for that word on the subject list. You can see that for our search, it says to use Crohn Disease without the asterisk. Click on Crohn Disease. You can see where it falls in the subject tree, what the broader, narrower and related terms are. These terms can give you other ideas for terms you can search. To select a subject, just check the box next to it. A list of subheadings will also come up, and you can choose one or more if you wish. Notice the other check boxes, explode and major concept. Checking explode will tell the database to do a very large search, to search the subject heading selected as well as all of its subheadings and narrower terms. Checking major concept will search that term as a major subject heading only. Let's check inflammatory bowel disease and explode to get a broad search.
At this point, you can either search the database or you can browse other subjects by clicking on back to term list, and scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking on browse additional terms. Let's search for probiotics in the subject list. Check probiotics, and that will paste it into our search box. But change the combined selections with choice to and. This'll make sure that we get articles that include inflammatory bowel disease and probiotics. Now click search. We haven't yet applied any date or other restrictions to our search. To do this, on the left, where it says refine your results, click on show more. This will bring up the limiter screen. Fill in the dates and check peer reviewed as before. And then click on search. Now we have around 200 results.
In this case, our results are not much different from our keyword searching, but for other topics, doing a subject heading search can make a big difference. Subject searching isn't necessarily better than keyword searching, but it is useful to know about in case basic Google-like searching isn't getting you what you need. From here, you can retrieve and review your articles as we described above.