Medical subject headings used to search the biomedical literature.

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA ·Vol. 8 ·No. 4 ·2001-00-00 ·Pages 317-23

Coletti MH, Bleich HL

Abstract

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.

MeSH Terms

Abstracting and Indexing/history History, 19th Century History, 20th Century Information Storage and Retrieval/history,methods Internet MEDLARS/history MEDLINE/history Subject Headings Vocabulary, Controlled

Authors & Affiliations

2 authors, click to expand affiliations / ORCID

Coletti M H

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.

Bleich H L

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12 references, click to expand

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Article Info

Journal

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA

Abbr.

J Am Med Inform Assoc

ISSN

1067-5027

DOI

10.1136/jamia.2001.0080317

Published

2001-00-00

Pages

317-23

Language

English

Region

England

NLM ID

9430800

PMCID

PMC130076

Subset

Corrections

ErratumIn

External Links

PubMed source DOI: 10.1136/jamia.2001.0080317 PMC Full Text View journal details

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Medical subject headings used to search the biomedical literature.

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