CINAHL: Basic and advanced search

Search techniques and search strings

• Truncation: In CINAHL, the asterisk (*) represents any group of characters, including no character. Use it at the end of the root of your term. E.g. disease* searches for disease, diseases, diseased.
• Boolean operators OR, AND and NOT can be used to combine search terms

AND = finds results with all of your search terms.  AND narrows your search (i.e., get fewer citations).

OR = finds results with any of your search terms.  OR broadens your search (i.e., get more citations).

NOT = eliminates items that contain the specified term.  NOT narrows your search (i.e., get fewer citations).

• Proximity operator is used when the search terms need to be within a certain distance from each other. It defines how many words there can be between two words. E.g. in search string (distan* OR online OR virtual* OR remote*) N3 (educat* OR learn* OR teach*) N3 defines that there can be three words in maximum between the search terms. Word order can be inverted.
• Words written sequentially are located within five words apart. Word order can be inverted. E.g. nursing home = home nursing, nursing in patient's home etc.
• Phrase search: By using quotation marks (phrase search) you can search with the combination of two or more words. The words written inside the quotation marks will appear in that order in the search results. E.g. "nursing home resident" doesn't search for residents of a nursing home. 
• When searching with a hyphen, words that appear consecutively without a hyphen are also found. For example, "soci* emotion*" finds forms such as socio-emotional, socio emotional, and social emotional. However, the form socioemotional should be searched separately: "soci* emotion*" OR socioemotional.

Advanced Search

• As default three search fields are in use. If more search fields are needed, click "Add fields".
• Fields can be combined with operators AND, OR, NOT. Operators can be selected from the drop-down menu. 
• Within the search field, words can also be combined with the AND, OR, NOT operators.
• Enter your search terms in the boxes at the top of the screen (the database will suggest terms as you start typing). Add synonyms, asterisk (truncation) or quotation marks (phrase search) if necessary.
• It is possible to choose in which fields the search terms must be found. 
  • The default option is "All fields". This covers Title, Abstract and Subject Headings. This is suitable for systematic searching.
  • If you select "All Text" the database will search also the available full texts, so you are likely to get a lot of irrelevant results. If you don't select any field, keywords are by default targeted to titles, abstracts and subject headings. Note! All fields and All text have a different meaning.
  • "Title" searches from Article title field. This option is too narrow for systematic reviews.