Medical Subject Headings
Also known as MeSH, MeSH vocabulary
controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences
AI overview
Medical Subject Headings is a standardized system of approved terms used to organize and categorize scientific articles and books in medicine and life sciences, making it easier for researchers to find relevant publications. This controlled vocabulary matters because it ensures that papers on the same topic are consistently labeled with the same terms, rather than being scattered under different names for the same concept.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Key facts
- Description
- Medical Subject Headings
- Data types captured
- controlled vocabulary
- Research center
- United States National Library of Medicine , National Center for Biotechnology Information
- Laboratory
- United States National Library of Medicine
- Authors
- F. B. Rogers
- Primary citation
- PMID 13982385
- Website
- nlm.nih.gov/mesh
via Wikipedia infobox
Research
5,178 papers- Medical subject headings.Bulletin of the Medical Library Association · 1963
- Evaluation of Medical Subject Headings assignment in simulated patient articles.The International journal of pharmacy practice · 2024
Article
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 of index terms that facilitates searching. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE/PubMed article database and by NLM's catalog of book holdings. MeSH is also used by ClinicalTrials.gov registry to classify which diseases are studied by trials registered in ClinicalTrials.
MeSH was introduced in the 1960s, 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; MeSH is now available only online. It can be browsed and downloaded free of charge through PubMed. Originally in English, MeSH has been translated into numerous other languages and allows retrieval of documents from different origins.