New MeSH terms for 2017

The National Library of Medicine has released the 2017 update of their Medical Subject Headings, commonly known as MeSH. MeSH is a collection of standardized terms applied to articles in the Medline database.

A selection of 2017’s new MeSH headings include:

• Alert Fatigue, Health Personnel
• Cancer Pain
• Chocolate
• Conservative Treatment
• Global Burden of Disease
• Mentoring
• Patient Reported Outcome Measures
• Professional Practice Gaps

All details of changes to 2017 MeSH are available here.

When searching in PubMed or Ovid Medline, MeSH terms help to retrieve more relevant references than searching freely for words in the Title or Abstract.

Because of annual updates, it is important to check the term’s entry date – the year when the MeSH term started being applied to articles.

If the MeSH term has been introduced in recent years, it is important to search also the term in title/abstract or use the previous MeSH terms, otherwise older articles may not be captured.

To learn more about MeSH, including how to search PubMed and Ovid Medline more efficiently, register for a training session or contact your hospital librarian.

Published January 18, 2017.