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.
* Compassion Fatigue
* Contraceptive Prevalence Surveys
* Data Anonymization
* Digital Divide
* Gender Dysphoria
* Grandparents
* Infant Health (replacing Infant Welfare)
* Legendary Creatures
* Literacy
* Maternal Health (replacing Maternal Welfare)
* Open Access Publishing
* Pedestrians
* Presenteeism
* Romanticism
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.