CINAHL Indexing

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DSc* MSc* FCOptom FAAO Wolfgang Cagnolati1
1*Pennsylvania College of Optometry at Salus University, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Berliner Hochschule für Technik (BHT), University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany, Optometrie Cagnolati GmbH, Duisburg, Germany

On January 19, 2025, Optometry & Contact Lenses (OCL) received the official acceptance for indexing on the CINAHL Database. CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) is a bibliographic database of the US database provider EBSCO Publishing. 1315 journals are currently listed on the CINAHL Database. From optometry, for example, the prestigious journals “Optometry and Vision Science (OVS)” of the American Academy of Optometry (AAO) and “Contact Lens & Anterior Eye” of the British Contact lens Association (BCLA) as well as from ophthalmology “Archives of Ophthalmology” today “JAMA Ophthalmology” of the American Medical Association are listed on CINAHL. 
Indexing of medical literature dates back to the 1870s with the publication of the bibliographic indexes “Index Medicus” and “Index-Catalogue” by the “Library of the Surgeon-General's” of today's “U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM)”. John Shaw Billings, who first published the “Index Medicus” in 1879, was responsible for this.1 “Index-Catalogue” and 'Index Medicus' are considered forerunners of the large electronic bibliographic databases, such as “Medline”, which today is the most comprehensive and popular database for medicine and healthcare.  “PubMed” is the free English-language database of the NLM and contains the biomedical literature from Medline. Some of the important databases for the entire field of medicine are:


•    CINHAL
•    Cochrane
•    Medline/PubMed
•    Web of Science
•    Scopus

The indexing of scientific and clinical journals is an important quality indicator of published articles, as these have already passed a controlled peer review process. Jonuscheit et al. describe in detail in their publication “Peer Review: Purpose, Application and Relevance to Optometry and Science Communication”, why a peer review process is so important for the quality of scientific and clinical articles.2 Submitted papers in Optometry & Contact Lenses (OCL) are reviewed by two independent experts before publication. This is a prerequisite for indexing on a database relevant to biomedicine. The CINAHL indexing is now the first relating listing for the OCL. Further indexing is planned for the future. This also includes the important listing on Medline/PubMed.

The indexing of journals is as important for authors as it is for readers. Indexing is important for authors because indexed scientific journals are ranked on the basis of the quality of published articles using citation analyses. Indexing is important for readers because it guarantees the verified quality and evidence of the accepted clinical and scientific articles.

[1] Greenberg, S. J., Gallagher, P. E. (2009). The great contribution: Index Medicus, Index-Catalogue, and IndexCat. J. Med. Libr. Assoc., 97, 108-113.

[2] Jonuscheit, S., Cagnolati, W., Bärtschi, M., Pult, H. (2022). Peer Review: Zweck, Anwendung und Relevanz für die Opto­metrie und Wissenschaftskommunikation. Optom. Contact Lenses, 2, 225-228.