DIMDI - History and significance of the MeSH

History and significance of the MeSH

The MeSH initially emerged from the keyword register of the Index Medicus Bibliography. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the USA published these by since more than 100 years. The precursor of MeSH, the Subject Heading Authority List, was published by the NLM for the first time in 1954. In 1960, a new, fundamentally revised version was published as the Medical Subject Headings.

Concepts replaces descriptors

Towards the end of the year 1980, the growing terminology and the desire to improve the representation of the relationships among the MeSH terms led to the conversion of the descriptor-based structure to the concept-based structure and the development of a concept-based maintenance system for the MeSH terminology. Not visible to the user, the new structure enables a better representation of the relationships among the terms and easier updating of the translations. Furthermore, the restructuring facilitated the integration of the MeSH into the  Metathesaurus Unified Medical Language System (UMLS).

You can find a poster with a comparison of the old descriptor hierarchy with the new concept hierarchy on the NLM website. You can find details on the conversion in the following publication, the link can be found at the bottom of the page: Nelson, Stuart, J.; Schopen, Michael; Schulmann, Jacque-Lynne; Arliuk, Natalie. An Interlingual Database of MeSH Translations. 8th International Conference on Medical Librarianship; 2000 Jil 4; London, UK.

In 2004, the MeSH was issued for the first time in a new software environment, which enables the maintenance of all the MeSH translations online via Internet on the computer of the NLM.

MeSH as the central component of the UMLS

MeSH also gained significance through the development of the UMLS. In addition to many other (bio)medical terminologies, this metathesaurus also includes MeSH in several languages.

Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)

MEDLINE – Source and User of the MeSH

MeSH initially emerged from the keyword register of the Index Medicus Bibliography. The MEDLINE literature documentation system from the NLM is its successor, with users all over the world. The MEDLINE database is available with different hosts - also with DIMDI - and also uses the MeSH descriptors.

Application example: HONselect search machine

HONselect is a search machine from the Health On The Net Foundation (Geneva).  You can, among other things, display the different levels of the MeSH Tree Structures - a hierarchical classification of the key words - in German and in other languages.

External Information:

• History of MeSH
• Poster: descriptor-based hierarchy vs. concept-based hierarchy
• An Interlingual Database of MeSH Translations
• National Library of Medicine (NLM)
• UMLS Metathesaurus
• Search engine HONselect