Differences between CINAHL and MEDLINE/PubMed

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. PubMed includes all the content in MEDLINE.

CINAHL coverage is back to 1982. CINAHL is updated monthly. MEDLINE coverage goes back to 1966, with even older material available through Ovid's OLDMEDLINE database or PubMed. 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 MEDLINE/PubMed. Both cover the nursing and allied health journal literature, though CINAHL indexes some journals in these fields that are not included in MEDLINE. 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, using CINAHL is probably a good idea. However, if you are doing research on a multidisciplinary topic, you should probably use MEDLINE or both.

Both CINAHL and 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 Subject Headings. The official Medical Subject Headings used by MEDLINE and PubMed 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.