How to Do More Productive Searches: Using CINAHL and PubMed in Tandem CINAHL and PubMed are two of the databases that you use quite often in your research. In this tutorial you will learn how to use them in tandem to make your searches quick and productive, even when you have a difficult topic to research. Both of the databases offer a feature that will help you to find articles closely related to the ones that you find pertinent. In PubMed the mechanism is called Related Articles, in CINAHL Find Articles Like This. Here are the steps to take to make the research process easier and to take advantage of the features the databases offer. Start in CINAHL where you type the term you have been given in the top query box. The search mechanism consults the database s thesaurus to find the preferred term for the topic you entered. If it does not find the term, it allows you to use the word you typed in. This is called a Keyword. After the search engine collects the material with the preferred term or keyword, it displays in the Search History box the number of documents it finds. To access the material, you can either click on the underlined words View Results or on the Results tab, the third tab at the top. 1
Go through the list of articles until you find one that looks to be on target. The example below shows that the article is linked to the full text, but to make sure the article meets the criteria required by your professor, it is best to look at the details before printing it out. To obtain the details, click on the title of the article. The page with the abstract comes up. It displays not only a summary of the contents of the article, it also reveals other pertinent material the most important of which are the Major and Minor subjects covered by the author(s). Often the subject sets contain terms that may be useful in later searches, just in case collegiality does not work out. Several such terms stand out here: Intraprofessional Relations (nurse to nurse), Cooperative Behavior, and perhaps Socialization. Because the author writes about the use of socialization and other techniques to control horizontal violence, and, in addition, because she seeks to promote cooperative behavior or collegiality among the nurses, this is one article to print out and keep. Another promising article is the one shown below. 2
The author seeks to create communication skills and therapeutic relationships, terms that certainly describe collegiality or harmony between nurses. She does so to bring about collaboration, another word that borders on the term for which you are looking. Although the author uses Interprofessional Relations (nurse to physician) in her minor subjects, by reading her abstract you can see she is really speaking to the subject of collegiality, and the word itself actually appears in the abstract. This, also, is a good article to keep and print out. The next article is dead on subject as can be seen by its title 3
and its abstract. You will notice that this article has no direct link to the full text, but the document can be obtained by means to be discussed later on in the tutorial. The article is so completely in line with the topic you are to research, it is a good one to try out CINAHL s Find More Like This feature. In the page with the abstract, you will find the mechanism in a box located on the top right side of the screen. Click it to activate the process of relating articles to this one. Almost immediately you will find a document closely resembling one you saw in the previous searches, as its author covers the topic of horizontal violence, which is definitely the result of lack of congeniality. 4
On the page with the abstract, you see the same terminology you found in at least one of the previous articles. This alerts you to the value of the article for your research. You could go on and on with the search in CINAHL, using the Find More Like This feature, but for purposes of this demonstration, we have a sufficient number; so let s go on to PubMed to learn how to find Related Articles with the one we decide to use as a model. In PubMed there are two different methods of finding the model article, the one you need to find in PubMed in order to generate a list of related articles. You can use the PMID, the PubMed Identification Number if it is given, (you can see it in the illustration above) or you can use Limits to find it. Here is how to do it with the PMID. 5
Type the PMID number that you found in the abstract page of the article, Peer-to-Peer Mentoring, into the search box at the top of the screen. Then press the Go button to the right of the box. Almost immediately, the article springs up before your eyes. You can see the Related Articles on the right side of the screen. And to get to them, you need only to click on the words See all Related Articles at the bottom of the list. An added bonus in using this article to generate a list of related articles is that in PubMed there is a link to the full text of the article, whereas it was lacking in CINAHL. Let s try to find another article to use as the model article in PubMed, but this time using the Limits. We will use Longo s article on Horizontal Violence Among Nursing Students. First click on the Limits tab in PubMed. On the next screen, you will need to click on the Add Author button and type in the name of the author, last name first. Then, type in the first and middle initials if you have both: Longo s name has only one initial. 6
The name will appear in a drop box in orange letters. Click on the name in orange, and it will now appear in the box, correctly capitalized. Now, click on the Add Journal button and enter the name of the journal in which the article was published, or at least enough of the title to bring up its orange equivalent. Click on the title and it will appear in the journal box complete and in orange. Finally, to bring both author s name and journal s title to the search box at the top of the PubMed screen, click on the Go button. Both author and journal title will be lifted to the search box separated by the appropriate Boolean operator, AND, and the desired article will appear automatically on the screen. 7
Below, you will find the abstract of the article, and almost serendipitously, the link to the full text of the article. On the right side of the screen, you will find the titles of some of the related articles. As usual, by clicking on the words, See all Related Articles, you will the find twenty of the articles, the top articles being more closely related to the one you used as the model. Below you will find the first few articles from the Related Articles list. The first article is the model article, the one you used to generate the list of related articles. Article number three seems to be appropriate for your study, as by now, due to the proliferation of articles on incivility among nurses, you may have decided to report on the negative consequences of lack of collegiality. Or you could contrast the effects of collegiality versus incivility on nursing education. If you choose to write about the different negative behaviors exhibited by nursing students, you will need to find out about the availability of the article you have found. To do so, click on the tiny lined-page image on the left side of the list. 8
Below you will see the abstract of article number three. The authors report on cases of incivility not only among students but also among the faculty. The net result of this nastiness is the failure on the part of the students to learn and on the part of the instructors to teach effectively. Possibly, the authors suggest the serious consequences on the entire educational system, due to uncooperative behavior. What is clear is that the authors promise to introduce ways in which to curb incivility. The articles in the related links to this particular document are numerous and would probably allow you to retrieve as many as you need. Let s look at one more article in the list we generated with Longo s article and discuss how to find links to full text if a link shown at the top right of an abstract does not function and let s select an article whose first author is Kolanko. She and her partners cover a large list of intolerable behavior, a formidable challenge both to teachers and students. 9
You bring up the abstract and other details about the article either by using the PMID or the limiters and discover that there is no reliable link. The Nova insignia on the top of the page simply tells you that the university holds a subscription to the journal in which the article appears. Clicking on the insignia rarely if ever brings up the full text of the article, but at least you know Nova owns a subscription to the journal. You need to determine if the journal can be accessed online. To answer that question, you will need to use the university s Journal Finder, or A to Z. The link to it is located on the HPD Library home page. The access point is the line of text reading Online full text journals, in the lower left-hand quadrant at the top. Clicking on the line necessitates your being authenticated. The process is shown below. 10
The page with the Journal Finder comes into view. You now type in the journal s title in the query box supplied for this purpose and click on Search, or alternatively just hit the Enter key. If Nova owns a subscription to the journal in question, it will appear along with one or more providers for the journal. Writing down the citation or printing a page with the citation will help you to find the appropriate volume, issue, and page numbers with which to locate the article. 11
The university does have a subscription to the journal, and it is offered by a number of information vendors whose names are shown in dark blue under the title of the journal. You already know CINAHL, so you might prefer to use its vendor: EBSCO Publishing. By looking at the citation to the article you want, you can see that it was published in 2006. CINAHL covers articles published from 2002 to the present, so it is an appropriate one to select. Clicking on the text in dark blue: CINAHL Plus with Full Text brings up a screen with the available years listed. Naturally, you click on 2006. Clicking on 2006 reveals all of the issues published for that year. Again checking your citation, you see that you need issue number one, January and February. Hence, you click on that issue. The familiar CINAHL page comes up with the number of articles published in that issue: 19. 12
As you did at the beginning of your search, you click on View Results or on the Results tab to bring up the articles. Again checking your citation, you see that the article you want is on pages 34-43. You scroll down until you find those pages, and there is the article with the link to the PDF Full Text. And clicking on the PDF link brings up the article which you can now print out. You simply continue to find and print out articles using this procedure until you have found a sufficient number for your assignment. Remember to use the printer in this window. Last updated June, 2008 13
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