(^84) Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice: Model and Guidelines, Third Edition
Selecting Information and Evidence Resources
After search terms have been selected, EBP teams can identify quality databases
containing information on the topic. This section briefly reviews some of the
unique features of core EBP databases in nursing and medicine.CINAHL
The CINAHL covers nursing, biomedicine, alternative or complementary medi-
cine, and 17 allied health disciplines. CINAHL indexes more than 3,100 journals,
contains more than 3.4 million records dating back to 1981, and has complete
coverage of English-language nursing journals and publications from the Nation-
al League for Nursing and the American Nurses Association (ANA). In addition,
CINAHL contains healthcare books, nursing dissertations, selected conference
proceedings, standards of practice, and book chapters. Full-text material within
CINAHL includes more than 70 journals in addition to legal cases, clinical inno-
vations, critical paths, drug records, research instruments, and clinical trials.
CINAHL also contains a controlled vocabulary, CINAHL Subject Headings,
which allows for more precise and accurate retrieval. Terms are searched using
“MH for Exact Subject Heading” or “MM for Exact Major Subject Heading.”
CINAHL also allows you to search using detailed limits to narrow results by
publication type, age, gender, and language. The PICO on distractions could be
searched using the CINAHL headings (MH “Distraction”) AND (MH “Medi-
cation Errors”) in combination with the keywords distraction and medication
errors. The search strategy would look like this: ((MH “Distraction”) OR distrac-
tion) AND ((MH “Medication Errors”) OR “medication errors”).MEDLINE and PubMed
MEDLINE and PubMed are often used interchangeably; however, teams need to
keep in mind that they are not the same. PubMed searches MEDLINE but also
searches articles that are not yet indexed in MEDLINE and articles that are in-
cluded in PubMed Central.