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Nursing Research

PubMed vs. Medline

It's important to understand the difference between Medline and PubMed.  Medline is part of PubMed; when you search PubMed you are searching all of Medline, but if you only search Medline you will miss some material that is only in PubMed.

Comparing PubMed and Medline

For a truly thorough literature search you must search PubMed, not just Medline.  PubMed includes very new in-process articles that haven't yet been fully indexed for Medline, and other publications that do not meet the inclusion criteria for Medline.  Be aware that by building a search in the MeSH database you are by default only searching Medline, because only articles indexed for Medline have MeSH terms assigned to them.

For more details on the differences between PubMed and Medline, see here.

PICO Searching in New PubMed

PubMed Clinical Queries

If you want to see the full table of the clinical queries filters in PubMed, click here.

Advanced Searching in CINAHL

CINAHL is another important database for health sciences. CINAHL stands for the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature. CINAHL, like MEDLINE, is an indexed database. That means that the database uses a list of specific vocabulary called CINAHL subject headings to describe the concepts in an article. CINAHL subject headings are based on MesH but some may differ. Using CINAHL subject headings to build a search is the same basic concept as building a search using MeSH terms, but the mechanics of building the search are different.
This video shows how to build a search using CINAHL subject headings and save your search. Note you need to create a free My EbscoHost account to save searches in CINAHL. This account also works for other Ebsco databases such as PsycInfo.
Important notes: This video suggests using the Full text limit. I do not recommend using the full text limit because you may be leaving out the most relevant articles, and you can request them easily using InterLibrary Loan.
 
 
 
 
 

Citation Tracing

Citation tracing is the process of working from the list of references from a published article to retrieve the full text of articles you're interested in reading.