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HIP202 Research Skills Guide: Searching in CINAHL

Searching in CINAHL

When you log in to CINAHL Plus with Full Text, you get the EBSCOhost Advanced Search screen, with CINAHL Plus with Full Text as the selected database:

EBSCOhost search screen showing the default to Advanced Search and CINAHL as the chosen database

You can use the multiple search boxes to carry out complex searches.

Note that Select a Field (optional) means that EBSCOhost will search for your words in the main fields of each record. In a CINAHL search, these will be the title, abstract, and subject headings. This is the default, but it can be changed (see Searching using different fields).

Remember, EBSCOhost databases default to keyword searching. If you type in more than one word, EBSCOhost will insert the AND operator between them, and search for them as separate words. If you want to search for a phrase, you must enclosed the words in double quotation marks.

In EBSCOhost, you can “truncate a phrase". So typing in "occupational therap*" in the search box will search for "occupational therapy" OR "occupational therapist" OR "occupational therapists".

Example: to search for articles on occupational therapy or physiotherapy in relation to cerebral palsy, we could do this search:

CINAHL search screen showing the search for occupational therapy (truncated) OR physiotherapy (truncated) AND cerebral palsy

Try it now

Go to CINAHL Plus with Full Text.

Try using the multiple search boxes to search for material on speech therapy for either dysphasia or aphasia, as follows:

  •     In the first search box, type "speech therap*" OR "speech patholog*" OR "speech language patholog*"
  •     In the second search box, type dysphasi* OR aphasi*

Consider:

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