MeSH (identifier)

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. It serves as a thesaurus that facilitates searching. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the PubMed article database and by NLM's catalog of book holdings.

Overview

MeSH is the NLM's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity. MeSH descriptors are arranged in both an alphabetic and a hierarchical structure. At the most general level of the hierarchical structure are very broad headings such as "Anatomy" or "Mental Disorders". More specific headings are found at more narrow levels of the eleven-level hierarchy, such as "Ankle" and "Conduct Disorder".

In addition to the descriptor hierarchy, MeSH contains a small number of "qualifiers" (also known as subheadings), which can be added to descriptors to narrow down the topic. For example, "Measles" is a descriptor and "epidemiology" is a qualifier; the combined term "Measles/epidemiology" describes the structure of the published article about the epidemiology of measles. Similarly, the use of qualifiers (also called subheadings) with a descriptor allows the indexer to specify the aspect of the subject of indexing that is discussed.

Structure

The MeSH thesaurus is organized by subject categories, with more specific terms arranged beneath broader terms. The MeSH thesaurus includes approximately 27,000 subject headings in 16 categories, and more than 87,000 cross-references. Some of the subject categories are Anatomy, Organisms, Diseases, Chemicals and Drugs, Techniques and Equipment, Psychiatry and Psychology, Health Care, and many others.

Use in MEDLINE/PubMed

Every bibliographic reference is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the item. Similarly, every search executed in PubMed is mapped to MeSH terms. The MeSH terms found in the user's search are used to find similar articles.

See also

• Medical classification
• Medical literature retrieval
• Controlled vocabulary
• Medical Subject Headings in Wikidata