Developing Research Skills for Evidence and Enquiry for Practice (HWLS): Using the Databases

Medline and CINAHL

Medline (Ebsco) is a key database for the health subject areas. It covers Nursing, Health and pre-clinical sciences. 

CINAHL (Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature) is one of the key databases for these subject areas. It covers a broad range of topics related to professional practice, service development and communication.

Both Medline and CINAHL are hosted on the 'Ebsco' platform and as such work exactly the same. The following two videos introduce you to the databases and show you how to use a key feature provided - the database thesaurus. This is the database preferred terms and can be used with your own key words to help you find more research on your particular topic.

Introduction to using Medline - this shows you how to use Medline to construct a search. If you are using CINAHL the process is exactly the same.

Using CINAHL Headings - this video shows you how to use CINAHL headings. If you are using Medline, the thesaurus is called MeSH headings and is found in the same place as CINAHL headings. It is also the same process to use MeSH. 

Maternity & Infant Care

The Maternity & Infant Care database is really useful for anyone researching or working in this field. It contains journals, books, and grey literature relating to the midwifery profession, pregnancy, labour, birth, postnatal care, and neonatal care and the first year of an infant's life. This database coverage is from the mid-1980s.

Introduction to Maternity and Infant Care

ASSIA

ASSIA (Applied Social Science Index and Abstracts) is a key database if you are doing research in these areas: health, social services, psychology, criminology, sociology, economics, politics, race relations and education. So if your research topic is related to these, use ASSIA. It's easy to use and the following video gives an overview of some of the features of this particular database:

Introduction to ASSIA

APA PsycInfo

APA PsycInfo is a big psychology database so useful if your topic includes anything related to mental health. It is published by the American Psychological Associations and provides comprehensive indexing and abstracts of the international psychological literature from the 1800s to the present - so it has a wide range of articles! The video shows you how to search it using some of the features of this database.

Introduction to APA PsycInfo

Just to remind you! Your assignment brief clearly states that you need to find your articles from an academic database, and Google etc. are not this!

From your Assessment Brief:

Search strategy

• Run a search on a (one) database relevant to your field of practice 
• Use the “Keeping a record of your search” table to demonstrate your search and include this in the Appendix.
• Justification of your how you ran the search is important. You must discuss your search parameters and explain how you ran your search and how your narrowed/widened your search as appropriate.

N.B The Library Search itself is NOT a suitable database, nor is Google Scholar.