Tip #36: CINAHL Tertiary Headings

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Did you know that in addition to main headings and subheadings, CINAHL also uses tertiary subheadings? You've probably seen them in the Major and Minor Subject fields, but (if you are like me) you likely didn't notice them. In the example below, "Michigan" is a tertiary subheading linked to the heading "Colleges and Universities." At first glance it appears to be a subheading like "Prevention and Control," but in this case, it's actually different!

This example shows the "Michigan" tertiary subheading linked to a heading and subheading:

From the EBSCO help documentation,

 "Tertiary headings are used to indicate an age group or geographics. These headings are added when the age group or geographic area is key to the topic under discussion. The tertiary headings can be linked directly to CINAHL subject headings or to the end of a subject heading/subheading combination." 

For example, these are the Age Group tertiary subheadings:

  • In Adolescence 
  • In Adulthood
  • In Infancy and Childhood
  • In Middle Age
  • In Old Age
  • In Pregnancy
  • In Utero
 You can download the complete list of tertiary subheadings, including the geographic areas here!

Search Notes for Using Tertiary Subheadings

You can search for articles indexed with tertiary subheadings in a few different ways:
 
1: To "float" the tertiary subheading, search for a keyword from the tertiary subheading (or entire phrase - "In Old Age") in the MW field. Note that, depending on the specific term, this may also pull in CINAHL Subject Headings that contain the same term. This method works for a term like "infancy" better than "adolescence" when trying to pull in the tertiary subheading instead of the CINAHL Subject Heading because "adolescence" is also a subject heading (MH "Adolescence"). [Not sure why you wouldn't want to include the subject heading in a sensitive search, but this was just to demonstrate how CINAHL searches those fields.]

MH "Influenza+" AND MW infancy (1108 results)


 There is significant overlap between the above search and MH "Child+" AND MH "Influenza+" (3995), but it's interesting to see that there are 12 articles that appear in the 1108 set but not the 3995 set. 


2. You can also search for the tertiary subheading linked with a heading. According to the CINAHL help documentation, you need to remove the dash from the heading (for age groups), but I can't seem to get it to work like their example. I've found that it also doesn't seem to matter for the geographic subheadings. For example, the subject heading MW "Colleges and Universities Michigan" returns the same results as MW "Colleges and Universities -- Michigan." The search expression is not case sensitive.
 


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