CINAHL

CINAHL headings, or Subject Headings, is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus similar to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in PubMed. A controlled vocabulary is a specified, pre-determined collection of terms (about 30,000 in this case). They are used to catalog and index the article records in CINAHL. CINAHL Headings are arranged into tree structures and are updated every year to include new developments. You cannot make up or add your own subject headings, you can only use one of the pre-existing terms.

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.

Subject Headings vs. Keywords

It is considered best practice to use a combination of keywords and subject headings in your search. The most recent articles in CINAHL do not have subject headings attached to them yet, and it can take up to six months to be tagged with subject headings. To ensure your search is all-encompassing, combine your subject headings with keywords using the Boolean operator OR.

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 headings 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.

Subheadings are an advanced tool that provide more detail for your search. They can help narrow your subject headings to cover areas such as therapeutic use, diagnosis, ethical issues, physiology, and much more. 

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.