MeSH trivia - A. Névéol

	<- Back to home <- Page à Aurélie
	<- Work <- Travaux

Medical Subject Headings^® (MeSH^®)
Tools and Trivia

The following perl script computes the number of allowable MeSH main heading/subheading pairs based on the MeSH file in ASCII format made available by NLM:

countLegalMeSHpairs.pl .

For a general discussion of cycles in the UMLS^® (Unified Medical Language System^® ), see this paper (EN

) or this paper (FR

). Specifically, here is some evidence of cycles in MeSH (examples from MeSH 2008):

Morals F01.829.500
Ethics F01.829.500.519
vs.
Ethics K01.316
Morals K01.316.630
Immunoglobulin Fab Fragments D12.776.124.486.485.680.650
Immunoglobulin Variable Region D12.776.124.486.485.680.650.500
vs.
Immunoglobulin Variable Region D12.776.124.486.485.797
Immunoglobulin Fab Fragments D12.776.124.486.485.797.570

(mainly) MeSH-related field codes for PubMed^® Searches:

Starred main heading: measles [Majr]
Main heading, without explosion: measles [Mesh:NoExp]
Main heading/subheading pair: measles/diagnosis [MeSH Term]
Floating subheading: etiology [Subheading]
Author: Smith [author]
String in Title or Abstract: "measles outbreak" [Title/Abstract] (or "measles outbreak" [TIAB])

See NLM's website for more comprehensive PubMed Tutorials.

To search MeSH using NLM's MeSH Browser or CISMeF's terminology server:

Install these Firefox plugins

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by an appointment of A. Névéol to the NLM Postdoctoral Program sponsored by the National Library of Medicine and administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.

Sept. 2008