Medical Subject Headings

Medical Subject Headings[edit | edit source]

Medical Subject Headings (often abbreviated as MeSH) 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.

History[edit | edit source]

MeSH was introduced in 1960, with the NLM's own index catalogue and the subject headings of the Quarterly Cumulative Index Medicus (1940 edition) as precursors. The yearly printed version of MeSH was discontinued in 2007 and MeSH is now available online only. It can be browsed and downloaded free of charge through PubMed.

Structure[edit | edit source]

MeSH is hierarchically organized by subject categories, with more specific terms arranged beneath broader terms. It is updated annually to reflect changes in medicine and medical terminology. MeSH terms are arranged in alphabetic order and are assigned unique tree numbers.

Use in MEDLINE/PubMed[edit | edit source]

Every bibliographic reference is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the item. Similarly, every search executed in PubMed translates the search terms into the corresponding MeSH terms which increases the effectiveness of the search.

References[edit | edit source]

External links[edit | edit source]

Medical Subject Headings Resources
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