New MeSH terms for 2016

Finding the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) term for your search topic can often help you retrieve more relevant results and help ensure that you don’t miss articles.

MeSH is the National Library of Medicine controlled vocabulary thesaurus which is updated annually. NLM uses the MeSH thesaurus to index articles from thousands of biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMed database.

For the 2016 update to its MeSh terms, the NLM added 438 descriptors and replaced 17 others with more up-to-date terminology. In addition, 9 descriptors and 1 qualifier were deleted.

Here are a few of the new 2016 terms for your perusal. They include some minor adjustments, and a few surprises.

* Biobehavioral Sciences
* Cloud Computing
* Cosmeceuticals
* Data Anonymization
* Farmers (previously indexed as Agriculture)
* Health Equity
* Hydraulic Fracking
* Infant Health (replacing Infant Welfare)
* Legendary Creatures
* Maternal Health (replacing Maternal Welfare)
* Nerve Agents (previously indexed as Organophosphorus Compounds)
* Open Access Publishing
* Smartphone
* Spatial Regression
* Spirit Possession
* Toxicological Phenomena
* Unsupervised Machine Learning

Remember that these MeSH are new for 2016, so they won’t have a lot of articles tagged with them just yet, and most are not retroactive.

The NLM has an online article that you can read to see the entire list and to learn more about changes in MeSH if you’d like.