The index contains details of English language articles from 1985 to the present, and is updated monthly.
[1] As of 2016[update], the database covers more than 700 journal titles, over half of which are current publications.
[2] In 1991, the Nursing and Midwifery Index (NMI) was created by health librarians at Poole Hospital, Salisbury District Hospital and Bournemouth University; this became a database in 1994.
[4] The BNI database was launched on 1 January 1997 and covered 220 journals.
[5] As of September 2013[update], 81 of the journal titles indexed by BNI are not covered by the CINAHL databases, and 51 of these are published in the UK.