Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), Explained (Online)

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The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary produced by the National Library of Medicine. MeSH terms help users retrieve articles in PubMed or MEDLINE that are about a certain topic; whereas, keyword searching usually tells a database to look for specific keywords in the titles and abstracts of papers (or other user-specified fields).

Librarian, Kayla Del Biondo, will demonstrate the difference between searching with MeSH terms and searching with non-MeSH keywords, and more importantly, we will cover how these techniques can be used in combination during exhaustive literature review projects (systematic reviews, scoping reviews, etc.)

Attendees will also learn how to...

Navigate to the MeSH database to search for MeSH terms that relate to a particular PIO/PICO research question;

Search for literature using a single MeSH term or an 'exploded' MeSH hierarchy of terms.