CINAHL Complete

ADVISOR REVIEWS—STANDARD REVIEW CINAHL Complete

doi:10.5260/chara.22.2.26

Composite Score: HHH 7/8

Reviewed by:

Dawn Behrend Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory, North Carolina Date of Review: August 14, 2020

<dawn.behrend@lr.edu>

Abstract The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) Complete is subscription aggregate health and allied health sciences database own exclusively by EBSCO and available via the EBSCOhost platform. CINAHL Complete is the premier product in the lineup of five tiered versions including CINAHL, CINAHL Plus, CINAHL with Full Text, and CINAHL Plus with Full Text. The product has a wide audience of users including students, instructors, researchers, and practitioners. This robust collection indexes over 5,600 journals beginning in 1937, with 1,200 journals being offered with full-text and the large majority with no embargo. CINAHL Complete is valued for its substantial indexing of publications core to the nursing field, use of MeSH subject headings, and numerous options for advanced searching unique to the health sciences. Value-added features include accredited continuing education modules, evidence-based care sheets, and quick lessons. While the database is not an e-book aggregator, it includes a relatively small collection of e-books with most titles being rather outdated.

A potential drawback for those considering the addition of CINAHL Complete to their library is the lack of sharing of metadata between EBSCO and other commercial vendors which may complicate the reliability of linking to records for those libraries using a discovery service other than EBSCO Discovery Service. While much less sizeable in its holdings, ProQuest’s Nursing & Allied Health Source may be another possibility, particularly for those seeking a database for use with an academic population. EBSCO’s MEDLINE Complete may also be an option, particularly for those seeking historical publications in addition to current research.

Pricing Options

Access is by annual subscription. Pricing for academic institutions is based on a variety of factors including but not limited to FTE, existing EBSCO databases, consortium agreements and/or buying groups. Libraries should contact EBSCO for a customized quote.1

Product Overview/Description The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) is a well-known and highly respected subscription aggregate database serving the research needs of nurses and allied health professionals, health sciences students and instructors, and clinical researchers that will be of value to any academic library supporting health sciences programs and essential to medical libraries supporting professionals in the healthcare field. With its origins in 1961 as the print index, Cumulative Index to Nursing Literature, CINAHL has been owned by EBSCO Industries since 2003, and offered exclusively on the EBSCOhost platform since 2006. There are currently five tiered versions available: CINAHL; CINAHL Plus; CINAHL with Full Text; CINAHL Plus with Full Text; and CINAHL Complete. Described as “the definitive research tool for nursing and allied health professionals,” CINAHL Complete indexes a vast assortment of publications.2 The most recent coverage list indicates holdings of 5,649 journals with more than 1,200 of these being full-text and with indexing dating back to 1937. The database offers searchable cited references for over 1,500 of its titles beginning in 1985. In analyzing the coverage list, the majority of holdings are academic journals at 73% of the total collection, followed by magazines which comprise 24% of the collection. Most titles are identified as core, at 88% of the holdings, with the remainder being denoted as priority. While not present in substantial numbers, CINAHL Complete does include trade publications, reports, books, newspapers, and other publication types. Book publication dates range from 2007 to 2017 with less than 20% having been published in the last 5 years. The selection of dissertations is considerable at over 25,000 items. The collection is diverse in its inclusion of publications from 66 counties, with the top two countries represented being the United States (44%) and the United Kingdom (29%). Full-text for most publications is immediately available with 96% of titles having no embargo. Those publications with an embargo range from 1 to 18 months. The collection contains over six million records covering 50 nursing specialties as well as such popular health science disciplines as speech and language pathology, nutrition, and general health and medicine.

In addition to research publications, CINAHL Complete includes such value-added features as 170 continuing education modules accredited by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Accreditation Program and the International Association for Continuing Education and Training, 133 evidence-based care sheets, and 169 quick lessons which provide overviews of diseases and conditions. It should be noted that these features are also available in CINAHL Plus and CINAHL Plus with Full Text. EBSCO offers a number of “point of care” standalone products designed to assist medical and allied health professionals in making patient care decisions, such as DynaMed and Nursing Reference Center, which are compatible with CINAHL Complete.

CINAHL Complete is fully compatible with EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), and is purportedly compatible with other commercial discovery services, such as ProQuest’s Summon. However, the lack of sharing of metadata by EBSCO with non-EBSCO vendors and vice versa results in differences in metadata and record formats across vendors and platforms which can cause difficulties with OpenURL linking. Thus, libraries using discovery services other than EDS should keep in mind that linking to content in CINAHL Complete may be somewhat unreliable and that searching the database individually will often be more effective.

MARC records are available and comply with MARC21 standards. Usage statistics can be monitored by administrators through COUNTER-compliant reports. Additional administrative features include custom branding, ability to configure search results and display preferences, language settings, and creating and managing local collections.

el A compliant and is working towards WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance. EBSCOhost meets and/or exceeds Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Technical support is provided via EBSCOConnect 24/7 by e-mail or telephone. EBSCO provides a number of tutorials for effectively using the product from their website. User Interface/Navigation/Searching CINAHL Complete is available via the EBSCOhost platform which can be cross-searched with other EBSCO databases. The product is accessible with any web-enabled device, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Compatible browsers include the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and version 10.0 or later of Internet Explorer. The Microsoft Edge browser is not supported. The database can be searched on a mobile device through EBSCOhost which auto-detects when users are connecting from mobile devices and sends them to the most appropriate version of the higher, Android 2.3 or higher, and Kindle Fire OS 4.5.1 or higher. Users can set up a My EBSCOhost Account which will enable them to save searches and results to their folder as well as to create an alert for publications on topics of interest. The utility toolbar provides the options of a New Search, Publications, CINAHL Subject Headings, Evidence-Based Care Sheets, Quick Lessons, and More which provides the option to search cited references, images, and indexes. From the main search page, users can choose to conduct a basic search or

FIGURE 1 CINAHL Complete Basic Search Box

FIGURE 2 CINAHL Complete

Regarding accessibility, the EBSCOhost platform is WCAG 2.0 Lev-

interface. EBSCOhost mobile is fully optimized for Apple iOS 7 or

Advanced Search Options

advanced search, view their search history, or create an alert. Create Alert remains present next to the search box as the user navigates the database (see Figure 1).

When a basic search is performed, enabling the option Apply Equivalent Subjects expands the search to include the exact terms for that concept when a search term matches a known concept in the mapped vocabulary. The search can be limited from the basic search page by such standard options as date, full-text, peer-reviewed, English language, and publication type, as well as clinical queries, gender, and image. Once a search is performed, additional limiters are available on the left hand navigation bar of the results page including publisher, language, subject heading, age, and geography.

When performing an advanced search, users have an array of options for refining and limiting their results. There are 47 fields from which to choose including major and minor subjects, author affiliation, named person, legal case, and MEDLINE Info. Alternatively, or in addition to field search, users can select limiters from the advanced search page such as evidence-based practice, CE module, first author as nurse, special interest, and various patient criteria. Users can also choose to exclude MEDLINE records and to either include or exclude pre-CINAHL records. For both basic and advanced search, results default to sorting by relevance but can be changed to sort by date, source, or author. CINAHL Complete supports Boolean, wildcat, and truncation operators as well as searching by proximity and with parentheses. Figure 2 demonstrates a selection of available search limiters.

FIGURE 3 CINAHL Complete Database Search Result Options

CINAHL Complete uses a controlled vocabulary with subject headings based on the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), with additional specific nursing and allied health headings added as appropriate. The subject headings are arranged hierarchically. Users can select Explode to locate all references indexed to a search term as well as all references indexed to any narrower subject terms. Subject headings can also be restricted to the Major Concept of the record which restricts results to publications in which that subject heading is the main idea. Both Major Concept and Explode can be selected which will include results that include more narrow concepts when they are the main focus of that publication (see Figure 3).

Once selected, a result can be printed, e-mailed, saved, or exported to a number of reference management tools such as RefWorks, EndNote, or EasyBib. Users can also obtain a permalink for the record or send it to Google Drive.

Evidence-based care sheets and quick lessons can be searched alphabetically or by means of relevancy ranked with results being downloadable as a PDF. In order to access CEU modules, users must first register with the CINAHLeducation program.

Critical Evaluation For those academic and medical libraries seeking a comprehensive database geared to students, educators, researchers, and health and allied health practitioners, CINAHL Complete has much to offer. The aspects of the product that add to its value are the depth and breadth of indexed journals, substantial holdings of publications core to the field, integration of MeSH into the database’s subject headings, and ease of navigation by means of the familiar EBSCOhost platform. Perhaps the product’s greatest advantage lies in the plethora of advanced search options that are not similarly available in competing products. Further, the inclusion of continuing education modules, evidence-based care sheets, and quick lessons along with compatibility with EBSCO’s point-of-care products provide added benefits for healthcare professionals.

While there are few negative factors to this database, one potential drawback is that the e-books in the collection tend to be rather outdated which is also the case with Nursing & Allied Health. However, as CINAHL Complete is not primarily an e-book aggregator this issue is of relatively minimal concern. The product feature that might be most potentially problematic is the lack of sharing of metadata by EBSCO with other discovery services which can pose potential challenges for those libraries that do not use EDS. Finally, while CINAHL Complete offers continuing education modules these are PDFs with Nursing & Allied Health offering continuing education video clips which may be more appealing to providers on the go.

Competitive Products In considering alternatives to CINAHL Complete, ProQuest’s Nursing & Allied Health Source and EBSCO’s MEDLINE with Full Text are potential options. All three databases are subscription based and make use of MeSH in their indexing. Whereas CINAHL Complete is proprietary to EBSCO and Nursing & Allied Health Source is proprietary to ProQuest, MEDLINE is available from a number of vendors, including the freely available PubMed. The databases differ primarily in the breadth of coverage, user interface, and availability of value-added features.

Nursing & Allied Health Sciences uses the ProQuest platform and is likely the most direct competitor the CINHAL lineup of products. This database seeks to differentiate itself by being largely academic in its focus by specifically meeting the needs of “those preparing for a career in healthcare, teaching patient care, or engaged in nursing research.”3 The coverage is quite broad, spanning 576 subjects. The collection indexes over 1,900 sources, of which the majority (74%) are scholarly journals, and many of which are full-text. The collection also offers access to over 29,000 dissertations. As with CINAHL Complete, there are relatively few e-books in the collection and range in date from 2002 and 2017 with most titles not being published within the last 5 years. A review of the publication list indicates titles dating back to 1933. A value-added component of Nursing & Allied Health Sciences is the inclusion of over 1,200 training video clips from MedCom which provides online continuing education courses. The product website states that “core nursing journal coverage is augmented with elite medical publications,” but does not indicate which titles are core publications in the published title list. Users can opt to utilize the ProQuest thesaurus or MeSH for searching by subject heading.

MEDLINE is a renowned biomedical database from the NLM to which free access is available through PubMed. MEDLINE is also licensed to a number of commercial database vendors, including EBSCO whose suite of products are MEDLINE, MEDLINE with Full Text, and MEDLINE Complete. MEDLINE Complete as the premier product in the collection can be compared to CINAHL Complete. This database is considered a full-text companion to MEDLINE and as such indexes over 2,200 full-text titles with nearly all (96%) being academic journals and with over 1,200 active full-text, non-open access journals with coverage dating to 1916. As CINAHL Complete

Free Text Keywords: EBSCO | CINAHL| Nursing | Allied Health | ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source | MEDLINE | National Library of Medicine | Health Sciences | MeSH

Primary Category: Medicine, Nursing & Health

Secondary Categories: Sociology, Education, Anthropology, Psychology

Type of product being reviewed: Aggregator database

Target Audience: Undergraduate (including community colleges); Graduate/Faculty/Researcher

Access: Subscription

CINAHL Complete Review Scores Composite: HHH 7/8

The maximum number of stars in each category is 5.

Content: HHHH A substantial collection of core health sciences and allied health sciences journals dating to 1937.Value-added features include continuing education modules, evidence-based care sheets, and quick lessons. Including video continuing education modules in addition to PDFs may be desirable, as well as increasing the currency of e-books.

User Interface/Searchability: HHH 1/2 The interface is easily navigated via the EBSCOhost platform. Holdings are expertly indexed using MeSH. The abundance of options to refine an advanced search are a definite advantage of this product. The product is compliant with accessibility standards. The lack of sharing of metadata between EBSCO and other commercial database vendors may complicate the ability to reliably link to records for those not using EDS as their discovery service.

Pricing: N/A As a direct quote was not provided by EBSCO, it is difficult to assess this area. Pricing for academic institutions is based on a variety of factors including but not limited to FTE, existing EBSCO databases, consortium agreements and/or buying groups.

Purchase/Contract Options: HHHH Contract provisions are standard for the product allowing for remote access and interlibrary loan within the scope of copyright laws.

Contact Information

EBSCO Information Services

10 Estes Street Ipswich, MA 01938 Phone: (978) 356-6500 E-mail: <information@ebsco.com> Producer URL: <https://www.ebsco.com> Product URL: <https://www.ebsco.com/products/researchdatabases/cinahl-complete>

includes records back to 1937 and Nursing & Allied Health Sciences to 1933, MEDLINE Complete may be a more appealing option for those engaged in historical clinical research. Unlike CINAHL Complete and Nursing & Allied Health Sciences there are no e-books, dissertations, videos, or other value-added elements such as continuing education materials.4

Purchase & Contract Provisions Purchase and contract provisions are outlined in the EBSCO License Agreement. Terms and conditions are standard to the product. Libraries may use content for Interlibrary Loan (ILL) as long as they abide by copyright law. EBSCO prefers for content to be faxed rather than provided electronically. Remote access is permissible to a library’s patrons with security procedures in place to prevent access from nonauthorized users. Authentication Access to the product is granted through a number of authentication methods including: IP address; referring URL; user ID and password; Open Athens; Single Sign-On; Google Sign-In; and Shibboleth.

Author’s References 1. Karena Donnelly (Senior Communications Specialist), e-mail message to author, July 2020. 2. CINAHL Complete. Accessed August 3, 2020. <https://www.ebscohost.com/nursing/product/cinahl-databases/cinahl-complete> 3. Nursing & Allied Health Database. Accessed August 7, 2020. <https://about.proquest.com/products-services/pq_nursingahs_ shtml.html> 4. MEDLINE Complete. Accessed August 7, 2020. <https://www. ebsco.com/products/research-databases/medline-complete>

About the Author

Dawn Behrend is an Instruction and Outreach Librarian at Lenoir-Rhyne University. Ms. Behrend holds a B.A. in Psychology, M.A. in Clinical Psychology, MBA, and MLS. She has over 20 years of experience as a psychologist who continues to work part-time in private practice and is a second career librarian where she serves as Lenoir-Rhyne University library’s liaison to the departments of business and economics, mathematics, computer science, psychology, and counseling. n