Medical Subject Headings

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

Medical Subject Headings (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.

Pronunciation

Medical Subject Headings: /ˈmɛdɪkəl ˈsʌbdʒɪkt ˈhɛdɪŋz/

Etymology

The term "Medical Subject Headings" is derived from the practice of organizing information by subject, a common practice in libraries and information centers. The term "headings" refers to the labels used to categorize this information.

Related Terms

Description

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".

Use in MEDLINE/PubMed

In MEDLINE/PubMed, every journal article is indexed with about 10-15 MeSH terms; the main subject of the article is described by one or two primary MeSH terms, and the additional MeSH terms describe other concepts discussed in the article.

External links

Medical encyclopedia article on Medical Subject Headings
Wikipedia's article - Medical Subject Headings

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Medical Subject Headings