What are Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)?

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MeSH is a controlled vocabulary, created and maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), that provides a consistent way of retrieving information that may use different terminology for the same concept.
MeSH are applied to each Medline citation by expert NLM indexers, who carefully consider the topics of each article.
MeSH helps to ensure that searches are comprehensive and allows for searching biomedical literature at varying levels of specificity.

Example

Search Term	MeSH Term
Stroke	Cerebrovascular Accident

Note: A search using the MeSH "Cerebrovascular Accident" will retrieve citations on cerebrovascular accidents and CVA, cerebral stroke, and apolexy.

MeSH can be used when searching both PubMed and Medline/OVID. MeSH is also available for searching the Library catalog.