When looking for journals, you may think that every journal in a Nursing database (like CINAHL) is automatically a Nursing journal. But nurses work in so many different areas (business administration, management, public health, education, as well as medicine and nursing), that sometimes our Nursing databases put all different kinds of journals into one place for nurses to search. That means that you might find helpful articles in journals that aren’t actually dedicated to Nursing.
So how do you know if you’re looking at a Nursing journal? This page shows you two ways to go about it.
In these examples, we’re looking at journals and articles in CINAHL, but these tactics can be applied to other databases, as well.
You can go into CINAHL and do a search for the journal in question. In this case, the Journal of Public Health. Before you hit the “Search” button, click the “Select a field (optional)” drop down menu and choose “Publication Name.” This tells the database that the words we’re searching are a journal title, not just keywords. That search will look something like this:
When you click that search button, you’re going to see a lot of articles from “American Journal of Public Health” or “Canadian Journal of Public Health.”
We don’t want to look at those right now, so scroll down until you see the “Publication” box in the left hand menu. From there check off the “Journal of Public Health” option (you might have to click the blue “show more” link to see all of your options.
Once you’ve selected that and your search results have been updated, you can see that all of the results now should be from the Journal of Public Health. You can click on an article title, scroll down until after the abstract, and see that there are Journal Subsets listed. If Nursing is in those subsets, then I think it’s fair to assume that this is a nursing journal.
The other way to tell if this journal is a nursing journal is to start at CINAHL’s homepage, click the “Publications” button (second to the right on the blue menu along the top of the screen).
Type the journal you’re looking for into the search bar and then click “Browse”
Click on the title of the journal you’re looking for, and it will bring you to the publication detail for that journal. If you scroll down, you can see the subjects that the journal covers. If Nursing is in there, it’s safe to say it’s a Nursing journal.
