RESEARCH Open AccessWhat value is the CINAHL database whensearching for systematic reviews ofqualitative studies?Kath Wright 1* , Su Golder 2 and Kate Lewis-Light 1AbstractBackground: The Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) is generally thought to be agood source to search when conducting a review of qualitative evidence. Case studies have suggested that usingCINAHL could be essential for reviews of qualitative studies covering topics in the nursing field, but it is unclearwhether this can be extended more generally to reviews of qualitative studies in other topic areas.Methods: We carried out a retrospective analysis of a sample of systematic reviews of qualitative studies toinvestigate CINAHL’s potential contribution to identifying the evidence. In particular, we planned to identify thepercentage of included studies available in CINAHL and the percentage of the included studies unique to theCINAHL database. After screening 58 qualitative systematic reviews identified from the Database of Abstracts ofReviews of Effects (DARE), we created a sample set of 43 reviews covering a range of topics including patientexperience of both illnesses and interventions.Results: For all 43 reviews (21 %) in our sample, we found that some of the included studies were available inCINAHL. For nine of these reviews, all the studies that had been included in the final synthesis were available in theCINAHL database, so it could have been possible to identify all the included studies using just this one database,while for an additional 21 reviews (49 %), 80 % or more of the included studies were available in CINAHL.Consequently, for a total of 30 reviews, or 70 % of our sample, 80 % or more of the studies could be identifiedusing CINAHL alone. 11 reviews, where we were able to recheck all the databases used by the original reviewauthors, had included a study that was uniquely identified from the CINAHL database. The median % of uniquestudies was 9.09 %; while the range had a lowest value of 5.0 % to the highest value of 33.0 %.Conclusions: Assuming a rigorous search strategy was used and the records sought were accurately indexed, wecould expect CINAHL to be a good source of primary studies for qualitative evidence syntheses. While we foundsome indication that CINAHL had the potential to provide unique studies for systematic reviews, we could onlyfully test this on a limited number of reviews, so we are less confident about this finding.BackgroundThe selection of databases used when carrying out litera-ture searching for a systematic review can have a signifi-cant impact upon the number of records retrieved and thesubsequent stages of the review in terms of time andresources spent as well as the review’s conclusions. Whilewishing to identify all the available relevant studies tominimise potential bias, researchers and information spe-cialists also want to minimise the number of irrelevantrecords retrieved so the choice of databases is a keydecision.Descriptions of database content are included in severalguides to conducting systematic reviews [1–3], but thereis no guidance on the optimum choice of databases. In-deed, as reviews are now carried out in a wide range ofspecialised topic areas such as diagnostics and prognos-tics, public health, adverse effects and economic evalua-tions, it would be difficult to make recommendations thatwould be appropriate in all circumstances.Database descriptions provided by database producersmay list the subject areas covered but tend to provide less* Correspondence: kath.wright@york.ac.uk1 Centre for Reviews & Dissemination, University of York, York, UKFull list of author information is available at the end of the article© 2015 Wright et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link tothe Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Wright et al. Systematic Reviews (2015) 4:104 DOI 10.1186/s13643-015-0069-4
