Medical Subject Headings

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

MeSH is a controlled vocabulary produced by the National Library of Medicine, Washington, DC.

"Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the hierarchical classification scheme of some 19,000 main headings and codes used for indexing databases produced by the National Library of Medicine, must be cited when looking for “best practices” in indexing. The Medline database is a premier biomedical database and is the electronic counterpart to Index Medicus, International Nursing Index, International Dental Literature. MeSH indexing available within Medline is a key feature of the database.
From 6-15 subject headings are assigned for each article, with up to 3 assigned for major emphasis of the article. Articles are indexed to the most specific term available to allow for very precise subject searching. Subheadings, terms which cover general, frequently discussed aspects of a subject such as adverse effects or therapy, are
combined with MeSH terms to indicate the specific focus of an article. A particularly powerful feature designed into Medline allows users to “explode” a category of terms in a hierarchy from general to specific to retrieve all of the articles on the general term and all of the specific terms listed underneath. “Explode” is distinct from the
concept of truncation in that the terms do not have to begin with the same string of characters to be retrieved. “Exploding” a term allows the information requestor to search a term and all levels of its narrower terms.
The Medical Subject Headings are continually revised and updated by subject specialists responsible for areas of the health sciences in which they have knowledge and expertise. The staff collects new terms as they appear in the scientific literature or in emerging areas of research; define these terms within the context of existing
vocabulary; and recommend their addition to MeSH. They also receive suggestions from indexers and other professionals. This indexing structure has stood the test of time and is widely acclaimed for the accuracy and precision in retrieval that it allows.
MeSH should be considered the gold standard and a benchmark for evaluating indexing structures in other disciplines" (Sykes, 2001, 5-6)

Jenuwine & Floyd (2004) investigated the performance of two search strategies in the retrieval of primary research papers containing descriptive information on the sleep of healthy people from MEDLINE. Two search strategies—one based on the use of only Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the second based on text-word searching—were evaluated as to their specificity and sensitivity in retrieving a set of relevant research papers published in the journal Sleep from 1996 to 2001 that were preselected by a hand search. The subject search provided higher specificity than the text-word search (66% and 47%, respectively) but lower sensitivity (78% for the subject search versus 88% for the text-word search). Each search strategy gave some unique relevant hits. The paper concludes that the two search strategies complemented each other and should be used together for maximal retrieval. No combination of MeSH terms could provide comprehensive yet reasonably precise retrieval of relevant articles. The text-word searching had sensitivity and specificity comparable to the subject search. In addition, use of text words "normal..... healthy," and "control" in the title or abstract fields to limit the final sets provided an efficient way to increase the specificity of both search strategies.

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National Library of Medicine, MeSH- homepage: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html