Attention Nurses – CINAHL CEU Awarded ANCC Accreditation

The American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) has awarded two years’ accreditation to Cinahl Information Systems beginning in August 2009. The ANCC is the American Nurses Credentialing Center. This accreditation is a great honor and demonstrates CINAHL ’s support for professional continuing education opportunities.  For more information about the accreditation process visit the ANCC website.

Walden University students, faculty and staff have access to the CINAHL CEU through the Walden University Library. To access the CEU topics, lessons and exams, go to the Walden library website and browse to the Research Databases list. Open the CINAHL database from the list of databases. In the top blue bar select More and click the quick lessons. This will open a browser to look up CEU lessons on a 100+ of topics.

The modules  will take between an hour to several hours to complete. You should be able to download and print out your certificate of completion.

Questions?  Please contact the library:

http://tinyurl.com/askwaldenlibrary

What is CINAHL?

CINAHL is a big ugly acronym for the Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature.  It is often overlooked due its nondescript name, but it is THE resource for nursing and allied health literature.

It is important to understand that this in an index to the literature. CINAHL has its own subject headings and searches nearly every nursing journal published plus selections from public health, emergency services, medical/laboratory technology, alternative therapies, and other allied health fields.

CINAHL should be your first stop for searching the literature in any of these fields.  One of the most important tricks in searching CINAHL is to match your search vocabulary to CINAHL’s vocabulary. Before you jump in with a keyword search, find out what terms CINAHL uses!

You will find the CINAHL Headings browser located on the top blue bar on the left side of the CINAHL search screen. The Headings browser is a smart little search mechanism that uses the language that you enter to most closely match up to the subject heading where your topic is likely to be indexed. 

When you find your subject heading you can click into it to view where it appears on the tree structure. You should notice on the right the subheadings associated with this subject to help you further focus your search. 

Remember that all articles are not created equal! It is very important to evaluate any literature that you are interested in using for your research.  That said, there is a nice limit in CINAHL located under search options (on the right side of the citations).  There is a check box for Research that you can select to limit your results to research articles. 

You will notice that there are links to the PDF or HTML full text for many articles in this database, but even citations that do not will have the Check Walden 360 link for full text below the citation. Click that link to check all of our holdings for the article.  We do have a number of full text titles that reside in other databases, but are indexed in CINAHL.

Most importantly, do not struggle with your searching and become frustrated.  Call or send us a message using our Ask A Librarian button on the library website.  Please ask us for assistance and we will help you get what you need from the literature instead of being frustrated by it!