MeSH - sporedata/researchdesigneR GitHub Wiki

General description

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary used by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for indexing articles for the MEDLINE/PubMed database.

Here are some key points about MeSH:

1. Purpose: MeSH terms provide a consistent way to retrieve information that may use different terminology for the same concepts. This helps in improving the accuracy and efficiency of information retrieval.

2. Structure: MeSH is organized in a hierarchical structure, also known as a "tree." This allows users to search at various levels of specificity. Terms are arranged in a tree structure with broader terms at the top and more specific terms at the bottom.

3. Types of Terms:

   • Descriptors: These are the main headings used to index articles. They cover a wide range of topics including diseases, chemicals, procedures, and more.
   • Qualifiers: Also known as subheadings, qualifiers are used in conjunction with descriptors to provide more specificity, such as “etiology” or “therapy” for diseases.
   • Supplementary Concept Records: These include substances (like chemicals and drugs) not included in the main MeSH headings but are often referenced in medical literature.

4. Updates: MeSH is updated annually to incorporate new terms and adjust existing ones to reflect changes in medical terminology and practice.

5. Usage: Researchers, healthcare professionals, and librarians use MeSH to ensure comprehensive and precise searching of the biomedical literature. For instance, when searching for articles on a specific disease, using the appropriate MeSH term can yield more relevant results than keyword searching alone.

6. Access: MeSH terms can be accessed through the NLM's website, and they are also integrated into various databases and search engines that index biomedical literature.

By using MeSH terms in your literature searches, you can enhance the precision and recall of your search results, making it easier to find the most relevant articles for your research.

MeSH benefit and categories

Categories

MeSH consists of 16 hierarchically-arranged trees, each of which has a unique letter allocated to it, as shown below:

• A - Anatomy
• B - Organisms
• C - Diseases
• D - Chemicals and Drugs
• E - Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment
• F - Psychiatry and Psychology
• G - Phenomena and Processes
• H - Disciplines and Occupations
• I - Anthropology, Education, Sociology and Social Phenomena
• J - Technology, Industry, and Agriculture
• K - Humanities
• L - Information Science
• M - Named Groups
• N - Health Care
• V - Publication Characteristics
• Z - Geographicals

Benefits

Mesh has three key benefits including

• MeSH indexing facilitates the retrieval of relevant articles even when authors have used different words or spellings to describe the same topic.
• MeSH indexing increases the discoverability of citations. If a citation has no abstract or otherwise does not effectively convey the topic(s) discussed in the article, MeSH indexing allows for discovery of this citation even by basic keyword searching.
• MeSH indexing facilitates searching of both the broad and the narrow simultaneously due to the existence of the MeSH hierarchy. MeSH Headings, Subheadings and Publication Types are organized in hierarchies, or "MeSH trees".

Limitations

MeSH might be of little service if:

• Your subject is a recently developed idea for which there isn't currently a MeSH phrase.
• You have a suspicion that not much has been written about your subject, which means that, once more, there is most likely no MeSH phrase.
• Unless your gene is one that has been extensively investigated, like BRCA1, your topic is a gene (most genes do not have MeSH words).
• You wish to obtain items that were just released. It's possible that the most recent PubMed publications aren't yet MEDLINE indexed. The time lag between citations entering the PubMed database and their MeSH word description might range from a few days to several weeks.

Related publications

• Improving information retrieval using Medical Subject Headings Concepts: a test case on rare and chronic diseases
• Comparative effectiveness research designs: an analysis of terms and coverage in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Emtree
• Variations in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) mapping: from the natural language of patron terms to the controlled vocabulary of mapped lists
• Using sentiment analysis to identify similarities and differences in research topics and medical subject headings (MeSH terms) between Medicine (Baltimore) and the Journal of the Formosan Medical Association (JFMA) in 2020
• Mapping the knowledge structure and trends of epilepsy genetics over the past decade

Data access

MeSH is publicly available and can be view on their platform

• MeSH