KU Medical Library - CINAHL

There are two ways to build an advanced search in CINAHL: You can use the Advanced Search interface, or you can just type in your search directly into the search box on the main page using the appropriate syntax with Booleans and other advanced techniques. For example, any of these searches would work (with different results) being typed in the main search box:

• cancer treatment elderly
• (cancer OR neoplasm) AND (elderly OR aged) and treatment
• (cancer OR MH "Neoplasms") AND (aged OR senior*) AND XB (treatment)

Like with Embase (though not PubMed), CINAHL supports proximity Boolean operators, which let you control how close search terms appear to one another. These work alongside the standard Booleans AND, OR, and NOT.

The N (Near) operator (the equivalent of NEAR in Embase) retrieves records where your chosen words appear within a certain number of words of each other, in any order. For example, typing cancer N5 treatment would find articles where cancer appears within five words of treatment — whether it says cancer treatment, treatment for cancer, or cancer outpatient treatment. This is useful when the exact wording may vary but you want to keep concepts tied closely together.

The W (Within) operator (NEXT in Embase) works in a similar way, but it enforces order as well as proximity. With cancer W5 treatment, CINAHL will only return results where cancer comes first and treatment appears within five words after it. This can be handy when you want to capture phrases or terms that are usually written in a specific sequence, like quality W3 life to search for quality of life. 

If you are unsure about the syntax to type in the basic search box on the main page of CINAHL, you can use the assisted Advanced search building. From the CINAHL home page you will find the link to the Advanced Search to the upper right of the basic search box.

When you open the Advanced Search interface you will be presented with a few different options:

• Field: You can select where you want to search for a word or phrase, such as title, author, etc.
• Boolean: Here you decide how to link the different search blocks, using AND, OR, or NOT. Note that EBSCO also can use a proximity search using the 'N' (Near) and 'W' (Within) operators.
• Add/delete rows: You can more search blocks, or delete unneeded ones.
• Filters: You can use filters to limit your results, though it is often best practice to do this after your initial search as it is easier to narrow results rather than trying to broaden them.

In addition to the advanced search interface, CINAHL also provides a tool for building searches using the PICO(T) framework. This is especially useful in nursing and allied health research, where clinical questions are often framed around the structure of Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome, and (sometimes) Time. The database offers dedicated fields for each of these elements, so you can break your question into its parts rather than entering one long string of keywords.

For example, instead of typing cancer treatment elderly as a single search, you could place elderly patients in the Population box, chemotherapy in the Intervention box, radiation therapy in the Comparison box, and quality of life in the Outcome box. Many versions of PICO used in nursing education also include a Time element and CINAHL’s PICO search screen provides a Time field.