The MeSH Medical Thesaurus
"MeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity." What we now know as MeSH began in 1954 as The Subject Heading Authority List and has been developed and refined ever since. [More information on the history of MeSH can be found on Wikipedia and the NLM's introduction to MeSH.]
After working with MeSH data for a client, we realized that there weren't any instances of MeSH on the web that could crawled by search engines (at least none that were well done and exposed the relational, interconnected nature of the MeSH data). As a result, you'd have to know about MeSH to find it and use it. When people search for a medical phrase in a search engine such as Google, they are never made aware of MeSH as a resource. Our goal withthese pages is to change that and bring MeSH to a wider audience.
The National Library of Medicine does have a version of the MeSH database that a human can browse , but it is not crawlable by search engine spiders because they put important information after the # sign in the URLs and search engines ignore everything after # signs. They also have a web page which lets you search the MeSH database (something this site does not try to replicate because it already exists), but it also cannot be crawled by search engines.
Root MeSH Descriptors:
- Anatomy
- Organisms
- Diseases
- Chemicals and Drugs
- Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment
- Psychiatry and Psychology
- Biological Sciences
- Natural Sciences
- Anthropology, Education, Sociology and Social Phenomena
- Technology, Industry, Agriculture
- Humanities
- Information Science
- Named Groups
- Health Care
- Publication Characteristics
- Geographicals
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Portions of this site are from MeSH 2007 which is created, maintained and provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
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