What’s MeSH?
MeSH is the abbreviation of Medical Subject Headings, which aims at describing bio-medical concepts with standardized terms. It is manually edited by NIH which determines a MeSH heading for each article after reading its full text. Among that, topic headings describing the main idea of an article are called Major Topic Headings while those describing an aspect of the topic are called subheadings.
Why we need MeSH?
There may be different descriptions for the same concept. For example, the two terms of Tumor and Neoplasm exactly have the same meaning. Therefore, when an inquirer wants to search articles about the relations between tumor and diet, he may input Tumor or Neoplasm as keyword, and actually there is no different between the two terms. Sometimes a retrieval system doesn’t recognize that, but except PubMed which can accurately recognize that with MeSH so as to avoid any omission of retrieval results. Formulating MeSH is to adopt fixed expressions for the same concept so as to control the vocabulary and to facilitate the communication between bio-medical scholars.
MeSH Homepage
You can find the latest MeSH vocabulary on its homepage http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/. RefNavigator also includes a local MeSH vocabulary browser. It’s more fast since all words are loaded from local file instead of from network.