Welcome to Resource Spotlight! The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library provides access to an incredible array of databases, e-book collections, software and more. In this series of posts, we’ll be showcasing highlights from our collection.
In this edition of Resource Spotlight, we’ll be looking at CINAHL - The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature. CINAHL is not only the home of a lot of the nursing and allied health literature that isn’t indexed in MEDLINE (PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE), but also features books and select conference proceedings.
The database features full-text articles from 1,300 journals in the field and citations from thousands more. The broad coverage is complemented by search tools geared specifically towards nursing and allied health inquiries. For the sake of brevity, we’ll only discuss two: Clinical Queries and Special Interest. CINAHL’s Clinical Queries tool on the advanced search page let you select what type of question you’re asking (therapy, prognosis, etiology, qualitative, etc.) and select how broad or specific answers you’d like to receive. This way, you don’t have to browse through unnecessary or off-topic results. The Special Interest lets you filter your results before you even search as well, but by topic. Some of the topics include Case Management, Evidence-Based Practice, Pain and Pain Management, and more.
In addition to providing access to the nursing and allied health literature, CINAHL also contains content to improve patient care such as:
- Continuing education modules
- Evidence-based care sheets ranging from treatment for breast cancer to “Music and Hospitalization”
- Educational materials for quick overviews of diseases and conditions
CINAHL is available to Yale affiliates through the VPN, YNHH affiliates through the proxy server, and everybody on the YaleSecure WiFi network.
For questions on how to best use CINAHL, feel free to contact the library.