Medical Subject Headings
The Medical Subject Headings ( MeSH ) are a thesaurus for subject indexing of books and journal articles in medicine and life sciences .
The MeSH system is maintained and revised by the United States National Library of Medicine . It is mainly used for the MEDLINE database , which is made available to the public for free research via the PubMed Internet portal operated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information .
A German translation of the MeSH will be created by DIMDI in Cologne. All main headings, all subheadings and almost all entry terms have been translated. The introductory vocabulary has been expanded by around 6,000 German terms.
With MeshPubMed , a knowledge-based search engine for biomedical texts explicitly relies on MeSH as the "table of contents" in order to structure the millions of articles in the MEDLINE database .
