A COMPARISON OF LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SUBJECT HEADINGS AND MEDICAL SUBJECT HEADINGS.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Medical Subject Headings↗
SEARCH · Search PubMed
Results for “Subject Headings”
Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
MEDICAL SUBJECT HEADINGS IN MEDLARS.
Use of an identical subject heading list for both machine searching and publication creates problems. Necessary compromises include precoordination of some headings for publication and use of some coordinates in the computer system that are not appropriate for a printed index. Determination of the headings under which a citation will appear in Index Medicus and those which will be used for it only in the computer requires anticipation of the way the published index will be used for search. Methods of selecting new terms are discussed and opinions solicited. The computer will be used in several ways to update the system and provide for annual publication of the subject heading list.
Abstracting and Indexing↗
Three-way division combined with conversion to Medical Subject Headings(MeSH) in a medium-sized medical library.
Conversion to MeSH and other reasons are enumerated for the division of an undivided dictionary card catalog into a three-way divided catalog, consisting of Proper Names, Titles, and Topical Subjects sections. Methodology of division is described. Conversion from Library of Congress Subject Headings to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) as an authority list stimulated such concurrent changes as (1) the introduction of a guide card system that eliminates typing of subject headings on catalog cards and (2) the adoption of a filing system that employs reverse chronological order for all types of sequential material in the Proper Names and Titles sections and for all material in the Topical Subjects section. The ancillary decisions, procedures, and methods necessitated by these major conversions are also described.
Catalogs, Library↗
The classified and alphabetical subject heading index to the catalog-class "Medicine, Pharmacy", of the subject catalog of the Deutsche Buecherei, Leipzig.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Humans↗
Conceptual mapping of user's queries to medical subject headings.
This paper describes a way to map users' queries to relevant Medical Subject Headings (MeSH terms) used by the National Library of Medicine to index the biomedical literature. The method, called SENSE (SEarch with New SEmantics), transforms words and phrases in the users' queries into primary conceptual components and compares these components with those of the MeSH vocabulary. Similar to the way in which most numbers can be split into numerical factors and expressed as their product--for example, 42 can be expressed as 2*21, 6*7, 3*14, 2*3*7,--so most medical concepts can be split into "semantic factors" and expressed as their juxtaposition. Note that if we split 42 into its primary factors, the breakdown is unique: 2*3*7. Similarly, when we split medical concepts into their "primary semantic factors" the breakdown is also unique. For example, the MeSH term 'renovascular hypertension' can be split morphologically into reno, vascular, hyper, and tension--morphemes that can then be translated into their primary semantic factors--kidney, blood vessel, high, and pressure. By "factoring" each MeSH term in this way, and by similarly factoring the user's query, we can match query to MeSH term by searching for combinations of common factors. Unlike UMLS and other methods that match at the level of words or phrases, SENSE matches at the level of concepts; in this way, a wide variety of words and phrases that have the same meaning produce the same match. Now used in PaperChase, the method is surprisingly powerful in matching users' queries to Medical Subject Headings.
Information Storage and Retrieval↗
SUBJECT HEADINGS IN THE WELLCOME HISTORICAL MEDICAL LIBRARY.
The strength and unity of the medical library profession spring largely from the existence of the National Library of Medicine. Its publications promise to bring much closer the standardization and consistency still lacking to the world of medical subject headings. The Wellcome Library headings are similar to those listed in the National Library of Medicine Subject Heading Authority List of 1960. However, references and additional headings are made to cover (1) superseded terms, (2) historical phenomena with distinctive names which are peculiar to an epoch, (3) subjects from social, religious, or other branches of history, and (4) eponyms. Old texts often describe disease ambiguously or use terminology which has since been superseded. The catalogue is in three parts-topographical, biographical, and topical. The quarterly Current Work has certain simplifications (e.g., elimination of some subheadings), and has recently introduced references both to cut down needless duplication and to facilitate consultation by the reader.
England↗
New medical subject heading lists: a comparative review of American and Soviet works.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Ethnicity↗
A three-dimensional human head finite element model and power flow in a human head subject to impact loading.
A three-dimensional finite element model of the human head is presented. The model has been validated against two sets of experimental results. To assess injury likelihood of the head subjected to impact loading, the structural intensity (SI) methodology is introduced in accordance with the prevailing practice in experimental biomechanics. SI is a vector quantity indicating the direction and magnitude of power flow inside a dynamically loaded structure. In this paper, the SI field inside the head model is computed for three cases, namely frontal, rear and side impacts. The results for the three cases have revealed that there exist power flow paths. The skull is, in general, a good energy flow channel. The study has also revealed the high possibility of spinal cord injury due to wave motion inside the head.
Acceleration↗
Searching the literature using medical subject headings versus text word with PubMed.
OBJECTIVE/HYPOTHESIS: This study was conducted to investigate the performance of two search strategies in the retrieval of information from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) on otolaryngology-head and neck surgery related conditions and diagnoses using PubMed. METHODS: Two search strategies-one based on the use of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and the second based on text word searching-were compared. RESULTS: The MeSH search provided a more efficient search than the text word search. CONCLUSIONS: Head and neck surgeons can most efficiently search the NLM using PubMed as a search engine by initiating the search with MeSH terms. Once a key article is identified, the searcher should use the "Related Articles" feature.
Humans↗
Variations in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) mapping: from the natural language of patron terms to the controlled vocabulary of mapped lists.
OBJECTIVES: This study compared the mapping of natural language patron terms to the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) across six MeSH interfaces for the MEDLINE database. METHODS: Test data were obtained from search requests submitted by patrons to the Library of the Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, over a nine-month period. Search request statements were parsed into separate terms or phrases. Using print sources from the National Library of Medicine, Each parsed patron term was assigned corresponding MeSH terms. Each patron term was entered into each of the selected interfaces to determine how effectively they mapped to MeSH. Data were collected for mapping success, accessibility of MeSH term within mapped list, and total number of MeSH choices within each list. RESULTS: The selected MEDLINE interfaces do not map the same patron term in the same way, nor do they consistently lead to what is considered the appropriate MeSH term. CONCLUSIONS: If searchers utilize the MEDLINE database to its fullest potential by mapping to MeSH, the results of the mapping will vary between interfaces. This variance may ultimately impact the search results. These differences should be considered when choosing a MEDLINE interface and when instructing end users.
Humans↗
Medical Subject Headings and medical terminology: an analysis of terminology used in hospital charts.
Terminology used by health professionals in everyday written discourse was compared with terminology in a standardized medical vocabulary, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Fifty written hospital charts were selected at random and analyzed by a computer program that identified MeSH terms in the charts. The charts were analyzed against two related MeSH vocabularies--one containing MeSH terms and one containing both MeSH terms and backwards cross-reference terms. When small words such as articles and prepositions were disregarded, approximately 50% of the words in a medical chart were found to be MeSH-related terminology. In addition, about 40% of MeSH-related words in the charts were either MeSH terms or backwards cross-reference terms.
Hospital Records↗
Understanding and using the medical subject headings (MeSH) vocabulary to perform literature searches.
The United States National Library of Medicine's (NLM) MEDLINE database is the largest and most widely used medical bibliographic database. MEDLINE is manually indexed with NLM's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) vocabulary. Using MeSH, a searcher can potentially create powerful and unambiguous MEDLINE queries. This article reviews the structure and use of MeSH, directed toward the nonexpert, and outlines how MeSH may help resolve a number of common difficulties encountered when searching MEDLINE. The increasing importance of the MEDLINE database as an information resource and the trend toward individuals performing their own bibliographic searches makes it crucial that health care professionals become familiar with MeSH.
Databases, Bibliographic↗
Mapping of medical acronyms and initialisms to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) across selected systems.
INTRODUCTION: Given the common use of acronyms and initialisms in the health sciences, searchers may be entering these abbreviated terms rather than full phrases when searching online systems. The purpose of this study is to evaluate how various MEDLINE Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) interfaces map acronyms and initialisms to the MeSH vocabulary. METHODS: The interfaces used in this study were: the PubMed MeSH database, the PubMed Automatic Term Mapping feature, the NLM Gateway Term Finder, and Ovid MEDLINE. Acronyms and initialisms were randomly selected from 2 print sources. The test data set included 415 randomly selected acronyms and initialisms whose related meanings were found to be MeSH terms. Each acronym and initialism was entered into each MEDLINE MeSH interface to determine if it mapped to the corresponding MeSH term. Separately, 46 commonly used acronyms and initialisms were tested. RESULTS: While performance differed widely, the success rates were low across all interfaces for the randomly selected terms. The common acronyms and initialisms tested at higher success rates across the interfaces, but the differences between the interfaces remained. CONCLUSION: Online interfaces do not always map medical acronyms and initialisms to their corresponding MeSH phrases. This may lead to inaccurate results and missed information if acronyms and initialisms are used in search strategies.
Abbreviations as Topic↗
CINAHL list of subject headings: a nursing thesaurus revised.
The rationale and methods for revising the thesaurus of one of the major health sciences indexing tools are discussed. Computer production of the Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature and the possibility of online access mandated a revision of the list of subject headings. CINAHL has maintained a policy of responding to user needs and to changes in the nursing and allied health literature, and user input was encouraged during revision of the thesaurus. The methods of structural revision are described, and major changes in the thesaurus are detailed. Modification of the thesaurus is expected to have a far-reaching impact on the retrieval of information in nursing and allied health. Nursing and Allied Health (CINAHL) is now available online through DIALOG (file 218) and BRS (access code NAHL).
Abstracting and Indexing↗
Comparison of Medical Subject Headings and text-word searches in MEDLINE to retrieve studies on sleep in healthy individuals.
OBJECTIVE: The objective was to investigate the performance of two search strategies in the retrieval of primary research papers containing descriptive information on the sleep of healthy people from MEDLINE. METHODOLOGY: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSIONS: 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.
Abbreviations as Topic↗
Medical subject headings used to search the biomedical literature.
The National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE (MEDLARS Online) database was the first database to be searched nationwide via value-added telecommunication networks. Now available on the World Wide Web free of charge from the National Library of Medicine and from many other sources, it is the world's most heavily used medical database. MEDLINE is unique in that each reference to the medical literature is indexed under a controlled vocabulary called Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). These headings are the keys that unlock the medical literature. MeSH multiplies the usefulness of the MEDLINE database and makes it possible to search the medical literature as we do today. This paper commemorates the 40th anniversary of the introduction of MeSH and salutes some of the farsighted persons who conceived and developed the MEDLINE database.
Abstracting and Indexing↗
Ontology annotation treebrowser : an interactive tool where the complementarity of medical subject headings and gene ontology improves the interpretation of gene lists.
Gene expression and proteomics analysis allow the investigation of thousands of biomolecules in parallel. This results in a long list of interesting genes or proteins and a list of annotation terms in the order of thousands. It is not a trivial task to understand such a gene list and it would require extensive efforts to bring together the overwhelming amounts of associated information from the literature and databases. Thus, it is evident that we need ways of condensing and filtering this information. An excellent way to represent knowledge is to use ontologies, where it is possible to group genes or terms with overlapping context, rather than studying one-dimensional lists of keywords. Therefore, we have built the ontology annotation treebrowser (OAT) to represent, condense, filter and summarise the knowledge associated with a list of genes or proteins. The OAT system consists of two disjointed parts; a MySQL database named OATdb, and a treebrowser engine that is implemented as a web interface. The OAT system is implemented using Perl scripts on an Apache web server and the gene, ontology and annotation data is stored in a relational MySQL database. In OAT, we have harmonized the two ontologies of medical subject headings (MeSH) and gene ontology (GO), to enable us to use knowledge both from the literature and the annotation projects in the same tool. OAT includes multiple gene identifier sets, which are merged internally in the OAT database. We have also generated novel MeSH annotations by mapping accession numbers to MEDLINE entries. The ontology browser OAT was created to facilitate the analysis of gene lists. It can be browsed dynamically, so that a scientist can interact with the data and govern the outcome. Test statistics show which branches are enriched. We also show that the two ontologies complement each other, with surprisingly low overlap, by mapping annotations to the Unified Medical Language System. We have developed a novel interactive annotation browser that is the first to incorporate both MeSH and GO for improved interpretation of gene lists. With OAT, we illustrate the benefits of combining MeSH and GO for understanding gene lists. OAT is available as a public web service at: http://www.ifm.liu.se/bioinfo/oat.
Algorithms↗