CINAHL with Full Text

Searching Tips
There are a number of helpful tips and hints you can use to improve your search results. For example, you can use Boolean operators to link terms together; limit the search to a specific title; and /or restrict the search to a particular date range.

Note: Stop-words are commonly used words such as articles, pronouns, and prepositions. These words are not indexed for searching in the database. For example, 'the', 'for', and 'of' are stop-words. When a stop-word is used in a query, any single word or no word is retrieved in place of the stop-word. When searching strings that contain stop-words or a Boolean operator, it is necessary to use quotation marks.

Boolean Operators
Sometimes a search can be overly general (results equal too many hits) or overly specific (results equal too few hits). To fine tune your search, you can use AND, OR, and NOT operators to link your search words together. These operators will help you narrow or broaden your search to better express the terms you are looking for and to retrieve the exact information you need quickly.

USING THE "AND" OPERATOR: If you have a search term that is too general, you can append several terms together using "AND". By stringing key terms together, you can further define your search and reduce the number of results. Note: Unless you define a specific search field, the result list will contain references where all your search terms are located in either the citation, full display or full text.

• For example, type high risk AND injury to find only articles that reference high risk injuries.

USING THE "OR" OPERATOR: In order to broaden a search, you can link terms together by using the "OR" operator. By using "OR" to link your terms together you can find documents on many topics. Linked by this operator, your words are searched simultaneously and independently of each other.

• As an example, search high risk AND injury OR trauma to find results that contain either the terms "high risk" and "injury", or the term "trauma".

USING THE "NOT" OPERATOR: In order to narrow a search, you can link words together by using the "NOT" operator. This operator will help you to filter out specific topics you do not wish included as part of your search.

Type: high risk OR injury NOT trauma to find results that contain the terms "high risk" or "injury", but not the term "trauma".
To further define your results, type: high risk AND injury AND trauma to constrict the search to include all terms linked by the "AND" operator.
Grouping Terms Together Using Parentheses
Parentheses also may be used to control a search query. Without parentheses, a search is executed from left to right. Words that you enclose in parentheses are searched first. Why is this important? Parentheses allow you to control and define the way the search will be executed. The left phrase in parentheses is searched first; then based upon those results the second phrase in parentheses is searched.

Generalized Search: heart or lung and blood or oxygen
Focused Search: (heart or lung) and (blood or oxygen)

In the first example, the search will retrieve everything on "heart" as well as references to the terms "lung" and "blood", and everything on "oxygen".

In the second example, we have used the parentheses to control our query to only find articles about heart or lung that reference blood or oxygen.

Limiting a Search Using Entry Date (EM)
Using the entry date field (em), you can narrow the search to a specific date. To search the most current articles of the database, the entry date field code is essential. For example,

• Type: critical care and EM 200012

In the example above, the entry month field will produce only results concerning critical care entered into the database in December 2000. Note: you can use a hyphen to indicate an open-ended date range. Entering a hyphen either before or after an entry month will find results "on or before" or "on or after" the date entered.

Example: type nursing home and EM 201207- (to retrieve articles about nursing homes entered from July 2007 to the present).
Example: type twins and EM -201207 (to retrieve articles about twins entered previous to and including July 2007).