You can find articles relating to a nursing theories or theorists in the CINAHL database by doing a CINAHL Subject Headings search for the name of your theory or theorist.
1. Navigate to CINAHL from the databases search tab on the library homepage.
- You can get to CINAHL by searching for it by name, selecting it from the 'Popular Databases' dropdown, or by viewing our list of Recommended databases for Nursing from our A-Z Databases page.
2. At the top of the CINAHL search page, click on CINAHL Subject Headings.
3. In the Subject Headings search box, enter the name of the theory or the theorist's last name. Then click the Browse button. For example, to find articles relating to the Neuman Systems Model, enter: Neuman.
4. Check the box next to the name of your theory in the list of results. (If there are no results for your theory/theorist, skip to step #7.)
5. Click the green Search Database button on the right side of the screen.
6. The search results page will list all articles in CINAHL that have been tagged with your selected nursing theory. From here you can browse the articles or narrow the scope of your results by applying search limiters (such as publication date range) and adding additional terms into your search.
7. If your nursing theory or theorist doesn't have a CINAHL Subject Heading, then you can go back to the main CINAHL search page and enter the name of the theory/theorist into the search box.
Tip: Put the name of the nursing theory within quotes to search it as an exact phrase.
8. If you're not finding relevant results in CINAHL, try searching the name of the theory/theorist in one of the other recommended databases for nursing, such as the Nursing & Allied Health Database or even Google Scholar (see: How do I get full text articles in Google Scholar?) . Follow the search strategy mentioned above in step #7.
