CINAHL

CINAHL headings, or Subject Headings, is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus similar to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in PubMed. CINAHL headings provide a standardized terms to describe contents of articles. 

Why use CINAHL Headings

They are a retrieval tool that can help increase the accuracy and completeness of a search. Subject headings cannot be made up. CINAHL Headings has a pre-determined collection of terms (30,000 in CINAHL). Each article in CINAHL is indexed with a handful of these terms. When searching on subject headings, all articles tagged with that heading will be retrieved.

1. In Advanced Search, you will find "CINAHL Headings" under the three search boxes.  If you are in Basic Search, you can find a link to Advanced Search in the upper right area. 

2. Type your term into the Search box and hit the search icon. Results will default to returning Subject headings by best match. You might have to scroll through to find the one that best fits what you're searching for.

Tip: you can also read more about each subject heading by clicking on the corresponding subject heading. There you will find a description of the heading and what it covers.

3. You could search on individual subject headings, but to build a comprehensive search strategy, you will want to add your key words. Type your  keywords in the second box, making sure you change the drop-down box AND to OR, then click Search.

You have completed the search for your first concept! Repeat the steps for all remaining concepts. 

4. After you have your searches of subject headings and keywords, you have to combine your searches together.

Tip: For more details on combining searches, look at our Searching Tips section. 

You have now completed a search that includes CINAHL's Subject Headings!

When using subject heading in CINAHL, you have the option to explode the heading(s), make the heading(s) a major concept, or both. Please note, that this new update of CINAHL interface, defaults to exploding a heading.

• Explode - retrieves all references indexed to that term as well as all references indexed to any narrower subject terms. This will increase the number of results. Not all subject heading will have the option to explode
• Major Concept -  retrieves references that have this subject heading as their main topic. This will find fewer results, but with higher relevance.
• Both - includes your selected subject heading as well as more specific headings, and only retrieves references that have any of these headings as their main topic. This broadens the scope of the search, while also increasing the specificity of the results.

CINAHL defaults to not having any subheadings. You have the option to narrow your results further by selecting specific subheadings from the list. However, this can be very restrictive and may cause you to miss relevant references. Use with caution. Also note that subheadings will vary from subject heading to subject heading.