What are MeSH terms?

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to provide a consistent way to index and catalogue biomedical and health-related information. Each term in MeSH represents a concept, such as a medical condition, drug, procedure, or anatomical structure. These terms are hierarchically organised to reflect their relationships and to allow for searches at different levels of detail. These terms are widely used in databases like PubMed to categorise articles in a structured way, making it easier to search for and find relevant information. MeSH terms are also useful in bioinformatics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and research analytics for categorising and analysing large volumes of biomedical data. You can learn more about and explore MeSH terms directly on the NLM MeSH Browser.