Searching of Literature Through Medical Subject Headings (MeSH): An Update

Abstract

Medical subject headings (MeSH) thesaurus is a controlled and hierarchically organized vocabulary produced by NLM (National Library of Medicine). It is very useful for indexing, cataloging, and searching biomedical and health related information. MeSH type of terms is very useful to the purpose of indexing a journal, cataloging, and searching of biomedical articles and books easily. These are hierarchical display so that broader and narrower are displayed as ‘descriptors’. This type of descriptors is organized in 16 categories. One user has thoroughly understood of the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that will be increased the efficiency and precision of both new and old MeSH users’ literature searching skills using PubMed. From this I have concluded that this MeSH will be very much useful to the physicians because they are using Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) and it will increase their literature searching habit and it is free to use. Furthermore, a detailed review article is needed to find any difficulties are there in MeSH using and to create awareness with new researchers in medical field. Keywords: medical subject headings, national library of medicine, indexing, cataloging, searching, biomedical, health information, researchers