By Sarah Bonato, Reference/Research Librarian, CAMH Library
The year is still new, so it's a good time to talk about the changes to the 2019 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) for searching PubMed.
What's this MeSH? It's a controlled vocabulary that's used for tagging an article in PubMed. Before an article is entered into PubMed, indexers at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) tag them with 10–12 labels describing their topics. When you use MeSH in a PubMed search, you can focus on finding specific content and (hopefully) retrieve less irrelevant results.
To keep current with newly emerging topics and changes in terminology, NLM updates MeSH every year. Old MeSH are replaced, new ones are added, and outdated ones are dropped. And there are many great new MeSH this year relevant to behavioural health topics!
New MeSH for 2019 include:
- Adverse Childhood Experiences
- Aggressive Driving
- Big Data
- Burnout, Psychological
- Change Management
- Embarrassment
- Ex-Smokers
- Family Separation
- Non-Smokers
- Online Social Networking
- Respect
- Road Rage
- Sadness
- Screen Time
- Self-Neglect
- Smoking Cessation Agents
You can also view the full (and very long) list of new 2019 MeSH at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/whatsnew.html.
Don’t know much about this MeSH or want to learn more about PubMed? Just visit NLM's Welcome to Medical Subject Headings at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/ and PubMed Tutorial at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmedtutorial/cover.html.
References
US National Library of Medicine. Fact Sheet: Medline. Bethesda, MD: U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html.
Want more education info, innovation and stories? Follow CAMH Education on Twitter: @camhEdu