Search CINAHL using your chosen terms, along with Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT (or the operators in the dropdown menus); the truncation symbol gets variations such as other word endings and plural forms. For example, putting in child* would get back child, child's, children, children's, childhood, and so on.

Also, terms connected with AND, OR, and NOT work much better than typing in an entire sentence.

A search like: (infection control or asepsis) and surger* and child*

should work much better than using a sentence such as: Do certain procedures protect children from post-surgical infections better than others? because the software tries to find the whole sentence if you type one in.

Using quotation marks: Want to find a phrase instead of individual words? Put the phrase "in quotes."

For example: "exercise compliance" OR "exercise adherence."

Be aware that this will limit your search.

Use the "Find It" button to locate items, if they aren't attached. CINAHL should include full text of many of the articles found.

There are many ways to limit a search in CINAHL to get a more relevant search result:

1. Choose fields in the search boxes from the dropdown menus to make a search more specific. A search for a word in the title of the article will find fewer but more specific articles, generally, than one that finds the term in an abstract or the text of the article.

For example, searching for PTSD in a title found ~900 articles, but searching with PTSD anywhere in the record gets twice as many-- more than 2,000 citations.

Note: even though you can use the acronym, the CINAHL heading is: Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic

2. Search with an author's name. Check the index of authors' names if you're not sure or just use the last name but choose the author field in the search box.

3. On the dropdown menus beside the search boxes, you can limit by language, by the type of article or study, by the publication's title, by the intended audience for the publication, by the population studied, by gender, by age, and other ways.

4. You can limit by date, by type of publication, and by subject descriptors, after you have done a search, using the tools on the left side of the screen.

5. If you use the terminology from the thesaurus, or find the descriptors at the foot of citations that you like the looks of, and click on them to retrieve results that are tagged with them, you are likely to get other, sometimes more relevant, search results.