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Advanced Searching in CINAHL

Systematic Reviews

Systematic reviews are expert overviews of subject areas and/or best practices. They include summaries of recent clinical trials, best practices, and effective treatments. 

Systematic reviews can be located in two tools: (1) the CINAHL journal index, and (2) the Cochrane Collection...which contains Controlled trials and other healthcare interventions, such as the Central Register of Controlled Trials, Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, Systematic Reviews, NHS Economic Evaluation, Health Technology Assessments, and the Methodology Register.

 

Start by searching the nursing journal index CINAHL Complete. Before you start to search by keyword, scroll down the page and change the setting for the "Publication Type" box to "Systematic Review" -- this will limit your results to exclude the majority of the primary research articles.

(An alternative approach is to later add "Systematic Review" as a keyword term in a separate search entry box.)

 

You can also search the Cochrane Collection Plus database for professionally created systematic reviews among the other reports and evidence based care sheets. Run your subject search, and then restrict your Database results to "Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews" on the bottom of the left column when you see results. 


Evidence-Based Databases

CINAHL Complete  (journals, systematic reviews, care sheets)

  • Use the Clinical Queries search option to limit to therapy, prognosis, and causation (etiology).
  • Check the box for Evidence-Based Practice.
  • Use the Publication Type search option to limit to Evidence-Based Care Sheet.

Cochrane Collection Plus. Controlled trials and other healthcare interventions, which include the Central Register of Controlled Trials, Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, Systematic Reviews, NHS Economic Evaluation, Health Technology Assessments, and the Methodology Register.

Clinical Trials - search the ClinicalTrials.gov registry.

National Guideline Clearinghouse. Objective, detailed information on clinical-practice guidelines.

MEDLINE with Full Text - Biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life-science journals, and online books.

PubMed Clinical Queries - subset of PubMed containing results limited to specific clinical research areas.

TRIP database - overlay of many sources containing high-quality clinical-research evidence.

Other Types of Search Tools

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