None of the recommendations on this page are foolproof ways to identify every article authored by a nurse. Here are several reasons why these strategies may miss nurse authors:
These search strategies work best when your topic search terms are giving you are large number of results. If you initial search returns a small number of articles (say 50 or fewer), you may be better off checking the articles directly for nurse authors.
There are two main ways to limit to nurse authors in CINAHL.
CINAHL is unique in having an option to limited to nurse authors built into the database. Follow these steps:
Warning: The built in limiter in CINAHL is convenient and provides high confidence that retrieved articles are authored by a nurse, however often misses articles that are nurse authored. If you use it and get few or no results, try a different strategy.
Searching the Affiliation database field (AF in CINAHL) helps you find articles where the authors nursing credentials (such as RN, NP, MSN, and DNP) or affiliation with a nursing school are recorded. Follow these steps:
AND ((AF nurs*) OR (AF RN) OR (AF NP) OR (AF DNP) OR (AF MSN NOT msn.com))
Searching the Affiliation database field (ad or affiliation in PubMed) helps you find articles where the authors nursing credentials (such as RN, NP, MSN, and DNP) or affiliation with a nursing school are recorded. Follow these steps:
AND ("nurs*"[ad] OR "RN"[ad] OR "NP"[ad] OR "DNP"[ad] OR ("MSN"[ad] NOT "msn.com"[ad]))