There are four ways to limit your search to nurse authors in CINAHL Complete:
1) The First Author is a Nurse limiter
2) Any Author is a Nurse limiter
3) The Journal Subset limiter
4) Author Affiliation AF limiter
1) First Author is a Nurse limiter is available in the Limit Your Results menu beneath the Advanced Search screen in CINAHL Complete.
To use, simply tick the First Author is a Nurse limiter box, enter your search terms in the search box, and click the Search button.
In scientific publishing, the first author is normally the person claiming most responsibility for the research.
So an article in which the first named author is a nurse has a higher probability of reflecting nursing research interests.
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2) The Any Author is a Nurse limiter is also located in the Limit Your Results menu (left coumn, below the "Human" subjects limiter).
To use, simply tick the Any Author is a Nurse limiter box, enter your search terms in the search box, and click the Search button.
Please note that, according to The CINAHL Databases - Frequently Asked Questions, the First Author is Nurse and Any Author is Nurse limiters only apply to records from November 2009 and forward.
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3) The Journal Subset limiter is located immediately below the Any Author is a Nurse limiter in (the left column of) Limit your results.
To use, scroll through the list of journal subsets. Find and select the Nursing subset. Enter your search terms and click the Search button.
Journal Subset restricts your search to the nursing journals (filtering out the journal literature of other allied health disciplines).
The assumption informing this strategy is that nursing authors will publish at a higher frequency in scholarly nursing journals than the authors of any other health science discipline.
While the logic is sound, the assumption is not fool proof. You will need to verify the nursing credentials of the authors by checking the author data in the article itself.
This is a broader strategy than limiting by nurse authors (above).
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4) Author Affiliation AF is an index field option available in the drop down menus of the search box.
To search by Author Affiliation,
1) scroll down the options in the menu bar;
2) Locate and select AF Author Affiliation,
3) type nurs* into the adjacent search box,
4) enter the keywords of your search topic in another search box
5) click the Search button.
Author Affiliation searches the institutional affiliation and address field within CINAHL.
Many nurse scholars teach at or are associated with departments of nursing in institutions of higher learning. And the word "nursing" is frequently included in the department heading. In most cases, the affiliated author will be a nurse.
But again, this is not a fool proof assumption. You will still need to verify the nursing credentials of the authors with reference to the article itself.
If you have additional questions please contact the Help Desk at 903.566.7343 or 903.566.7342, by chat, or by email at library@uttyler.edu.