This page is designed to allow library staff to add their comments to
our evaluation of the CINAHL interfaces that are now on trial. Send
your comments to either Stephanie Carter
[[email protected]] or Maureen Kelly
[[email protected]] and we will make sure that they are
posted.
If your institution is interested in the group purchase of CINAHL, please take a moment to visit the interest form where you can rank the interfaces in the order that you would be most likely to enter into a purchase agreement.
Comment posted by Elena Bianco, Shoreline Community College, to CLAMS-L. Reproduced here by permission.
My least favorite was the CINAHL interface - what the heck are those people thinking? At first it looked clean and uncomplicated but then when I tried to search, it was completely counter-intuitive, as far as I was concerned. When you type in a subject it drops you into the thesaurus listings, then it asks "do you want to explode the term chosen" and gives one or two other options. I'm not sure about any other colleges, but I think our students will have a real problem with that. It's also not very clear how to actually access the article citations from here. Once you do get a search where documents result, the "display" selection is hidden. These are just a few of the annoyances with this particular system.
I also was not impressed with Aries. The interface was cluttered. The results were a bit confusing. I also could not figure out a way to link to the Thesaurus subject headings. Each record listed what the related subject terms were, but there were no links.
The others fell somewhere in between. They were fine - certainly easier than going to the print version.
So anyway, those are my first impressions. I'll do some more exploring on these. I'm also asking the nursing & other allied health faculty at Shoreline to look these over and give me their recommendations.
Comment posted by Kate Bradley, Bellevue Community College. Reproduced here by permission.
I compared the CINAHL interfaces using the topic of "complications of total knee surgery", since our students are asked to do a lot of library research on complications of some kind of surgery.
I think my findings may be colored by my own familiarity with EbscoHost. With that caveat, here are my preferences, ranked from most favorite to least favorite.
EbscoHost
I searched this with an "AND" between each of the words and got 29 records.
What I liked was that I could keep the search strategy and go immediately
into Masterfile Premier and repeat the search. Since some medical journals
not covered by CINAHL are covered by Masterfile, I was able to extend my
retrieval by replicating it in another database.
OCLC Proquest I didn't like any of the others -
Knowledge Web, PVID, or Silver Platter. By far the worst interface is with
CINAHL itself.
I used "AND's" in between the words of the search phrase and retrieved 37
records. The database doesn't explain the ranking, but the records seemed
to be sorted by dare. All the descriptors were listed, so the searcher can
see how to refine the search (in this case, using
I got 27 records, a few of which were useful. Searched with "AND" in
between each term.
CINAHL was linked to "Proquest Nursing Journals", which is very confusing.
The latter database covers only from 1998 to the present time.
CINAHL needed to be searched only one field at a time: ti, abs, index, etc.
In the "Advanced Search", the Basic Index is confusing.
Backing out of Proquest is always a puzzling process - not intuitive.