Advanced Practice Nursing

Both CINAHL and PubMed use controlled vocabularies. CINAHL calls its thesaurus CINAHL Headings and PubMed calls its thesaurus MeSH. Because CINAHL is modeled after PubMed, you will notice that they share many similar features and functions.

Use the green CINAHL tab in this box to learn how to search using CINAHL Headings in CINAHL.

Use the box on right to learn how to search using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in PubMed.

General Information - Subject Headings

Many times, it may seem like you aren't able to find any good articles using the keywords that you've chosen. This could be that your chosen keyword has many meanings, or simply that the database doesn't recognize your term. The good news is that there is another way to search, and it's called subject heading searching.

Subject headings are words that are used by database developers to describe the content of an article or other information. They are the controlled vocabulary of that database. You may also hear them referred to as descriptors, headings, or index terms. They work in much the same way that tags work on social networking sites, i.e., they describe and organize content. These controlled vocabularies are specific to individual databases and are usually available under links such as "thesaurus," "headings," or "subjects."