MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)

MeSH is the US National Library of Medicine's (NLM) controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles from 4,300 of the world's leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE® database and for other NLM-produced databases. MeSH vocabulary is used to describe the content of an item, or is used to formulate searches to aid retrieval of items. MeSH has been employed for the indexing of websites in Glasgow Health Information as it is a widely used and recognised international standard in the indexing of biomedical and health related literature and documentation, with MEDLINE being the most accessed biomedical database in the world.

MeSH terminology provides a consistent way to retrieve information that may use different terminology for the same concepts - for example all articles dealing with the theme of cancer or oncology would be found using the term "neoplasms". For this reason, it is highly recommended that you use the Subject Search option to ensure more accurate searching of our database.

For more information on MeSH, see the NLM MeSH Site.