Medical subject headings

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 as precursors. The yearly printed version of MeSH was discontinued in 2007 and MeSH is now available online only.

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 established in the MeSH database as descriptors (main headings), qualifiers (subheadings), and supplementary concept records (SCRs).

Use[edit | edit source]

MeSH is used by health professionals, medical librarians and information specialists, to search and catalog biomedical literature. The MeSH thesaurus is used by NLM for indexing articles from 5,200 of the world's leading biomedical journals for the database PubMed.