Nursing Research

Keywords are the search terms (or subject terms) that you enter into a database to describe the topics of articles that you want to find. Different healthcare databases perform their basic searches in different ways, then deliver lists of results that match what you entered:

• The CINAHL, LibSearch, and PubMed databases will match your keywords against the main topics of the articles - words from the title, abstract, and subject headings (such as specialized healthcare ones from MeSH or CINAHL, see below). The results can be more precise, finding mostly relevant results, but may leave out other possibly relevant articles.
• The ProQuest databases (Nursing & Allied Health, Health Administration, and Health & Medical Collection databases) match your keywords to all words in the full text of the articles. They have higher sensitivity and recall, missing fewer potentially useful articles, but finding many more documents that are not relevant. 

 MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is a controlled medical vocabulary produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It is used for indexing & searching of medical and health-related journal articles, mostly in PubMed and other healthcare databases. It's organized in a tree structure, gathering together articles using different terminology under the major MeSH term the article is about, so you can find them whether the article uses the term myocardial infarction or heart attack (synonyms) or cardiogenic shock (a narrower term), for example.

CINAHL Subject Headings is a healthcare vocabulary based on MeSH, but including many additional terms from the nursing and allied health literature. The videos below demonstrate how to use them to refine your search in CINAHL.