Health Sciences Library Guides: Course Support: HID-I Health, Illness and Disease-I: MeSH: Medical Subject Headings

Searching with subject headings

A subject heading is a term attached to a database record to describe a particular concept in that paper, regardless of the words or phrases used by the author(s). For instance, a paper discussing "car crashes" and a paper discussing "automobile accidents" would have the subject heading "Accidents, Traffic" assigned to them in PubMed.

Searching for subject headings can be used as an alternative (or complement) to keyword searching. It can also improve both the accuracy and the comprehensiveness of your database searching.

See the links below for descriptions of how to use Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) when searching PubMed:

Using PubMed at DeLib
The MeSH section of our guide to using PubMed at on Health Sciences Library.
Searching PubMed
Advice on how to search PubMed - scroll down for sample searches using MeSH (from the University of Illinois at Chicago).
Video: Use MeSH to Build a Better Search
A PubMed video that "shows how to build a targeted PubMed search starting in the MeSH database. It includes very brief background on MeSH terms and indexing." Note that this video was created using an older version of PubMed, so the appearance may differ when you use it.

Subject Guide

Ross MacDonald

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Subjects: Biology, Cardiology, Consumer Health, Global Health, Histology, Infectious Disease, Internal and Family Medicine, Mathematics and Statistics, Mental and Behavioral Health, Pathology, Physics and Engineering, Preventative Medicine