Differences between CINAHL and PubMed/MEDLINE

CINAHL indexes journal articles, books and book chapters, dissertations, audiovisual materials, and other formats. MEDLINE, a large biomedical database produced by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), indexes journal literature only. Note: MEDLINE is available through the Ovid system and also on NLM's own search system called PubMed. MEDLINE and PubMed are essentially the same database, though PubMed may include newer references that haven't yet been fully indexed for MEDLINE.

CINAHL coverage is back to 1982 (and for some journals even farther back). CINAHL is updated monthly. PubMed/MEDLINE coverage goes back to 1950. MEDLINE is updated weekly on the Ovid system, and PubMed is updated daily.

There is a lot of overlap in the coverage of CINAHL and PubMed/MEDLINE. Both cover the nursing and allied health journal literature, though CINAHL indexes some journals in these fields that are not included in PubMed/MEDLINE. PubMed/MEDLINE provides more comprehensive coverage of the biomedical journal literature as a whole, though CINAHL does index some of the core clinical medical journals. If you are only interested in the nursing or allied health literature, starting with CINAHL is probably a good idea and may be sufficient. However, if you are doing research on a multidisciplinary topic, you should use both PubMed/MEDLINE and CINAHL.

Both CINAHL and PubMed/MEDLINE use official subject headings (“controlled vocabulary” terms) to describe the content of the materials they index. In CINAHL these terms are known as CINAHL Headings. The official Medical Subject Headings used by PubMed/MEDLINE are known as MeSH terms. In many cases the subject headings are the same in CINAHL and MEDLINE, but not always! CINAHL uses many unique terms related to nursing and allied health, and MEDLINE uses unique terms for other biomedical topics.