Medical Subject Headings


Medical Subject Headings

A standard set of keyboarding terms used by the US National Library of Medicine to Index Medicus and Medline.

Med·i·cal Sub·ject Head·ings

(MeSH) (med'i-kăl sŭb'jekt hed'ings) A huge controlled vocabulary (or metadata system) for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE article database and by NLM's catalog of book holdings. MeSH can be browsed and downloaded free of charge on the Internet; a printed version is published once a year.