CINAHL

RR 2012/077 CINAHL EBSCO Publishing Ipswich, MA Contact publisher for pricing information URL: www.ebscohost.com/academic/the-cinahl-database Last visited October 2011

Keywords Electronic media. Indexing services. Nursing

Review DOI 10.1108/09504121211205223

The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature or CINAHL has a substantial history. Originating from a 1940s card index and first becoming available online in the 1980s, it has undergone many metamorphoses. In 2003 it was acquired by EBSCO Publishing, but CINAHL remained available through several commercial interfaces, including OVID and Proquest, until it was made exclusively available on the EBSCOhost Platform in 2006. Today, it is aimed at hospital libraries and healthcare programmes in academic institutions and is available in four versions, two with selected full text. "Plus" versions offer extra content such as Evidence-Based Care Sheets, Quick Lessons and cited reference functionality. Reviews of these features rate them as useful but purely supplementary. Users are well supported online and through other means. At the time of writing, EBSCO were conducting international WebEx training on searching CINAHL as well as the customisation options and individual account functionalities.

On its web site the CINAHL Criteria tells us little about the content but the site provides title lists with coverage for each version (in PDF, Excel or HTML); these include the "start" and "stop" dates for full text content and should be scrutinised if purchasing considerations include the extent of availability of specific titles. In my experience, the "Full Text" label causes some confusion with users. The maximum proportion of full text content in the "Full Text" versions is around 20 percent. Coverage starts with a scattering of content dating back to 1937. New content is added weekly. CINAHL says it includes a broad spectrum of document types from journal articles to audiovisual...