Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designer of the vocabulary, in contrast to natural language for the purpose of indexing An index is a list of words or phrases and associated pointers ('locators') to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document. In a traditional back-of-the-book index the headings will include names of people, places and events, and concepts selected by a person as being relevant and of interest to a possible reader of journal articles and books in the life sciences; it can also serve as a thesaurus A thesaurus is a work that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning , in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations that facilitates searching. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine The United States National Library of Medicine , operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library. The collections of the National Library of Medicine include more than seven million books, journals, technical reports, manuscripts, microfilms, photographs, and images on medicine and related sciences (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE MEDLINE is a literature database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, and fields such as molecular evolution. Listing of an article or journal in MEDLINE is not endorsement/PubMed PubMed is a free search engine for accessing the MEDLINE database of citations, abstracts and some full text articles on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains PubMed as part of the Entrez information retrieval system. Listing an article or journal in article database and by NLM's catalog of book holdings.
MeSH can be browsed and downloaded free of charge on the Internet through PubMed PubMed is a free search engine for accessing the MEDLINE database of citations, abstracts and some full text articles on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains PubMed as part of the Entrez information retrieval system. Listing an article or journal in. The yearly printed version was discontinued in 2007 and MeSH is now available online only.[1] Originally in English, MeSH has been translated into numerous other languages and allows retrieval of documents from different languages.
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