Wednesday, October 21, 2015

MeSH on Demand Tool from the NLM


MeSH on Demand is a computerized indexing tool handy for quickly identifying MeSH Terms in a set of inputted text. It is freely available to use from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) - Access the site online here: http://ii.nlm.nih.gov/Interactive/MeSHonDemand.shtml 

MeSH on Demand identifies the NLM's controlled medical subject headings, called MeSH Terms for short,  in your set of inputted text, using the NLM Medical Text Indexer (MTI) program. After processing, MeSH on Demand returns a simple computer generated list of MeSH Terms identified as relevant to your chunk of text (can be up to 10,000 characters). Each of the identified MeSH Terms has a link to the corresponding MeSH Browser Web page for that MeSH Term. For more information about MeSH on Demand read the announcement in the  NLM Technical Bulletin article.

As the output is computer generated you may well question how well the results mirror what a human indexer would have done. An excellent comparison was done by Mahria LeBow (March 2014) and posted on the Dragonfly blog from the NN/LM National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region. The author concluded that "These terms would be able to give me a starting place for searching for related literature, and they happen to have a fair amount of overlap with the terms generated by a human indexer on a similar, older article." Another potential use Mahria identified for this tool was  "to identify possible MeSH terms for recently published articles of interest that are still listed as “in process” in PubMed."

Try it out and let me know how well the tool performs for you by leaving your comments.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Friday, May 18, 2012

Going Beyond Keyword Searching

Take your searching skills to the next level with MeSH! What is MeSH? MeSH simply means Medical Subject Headings and is a taxonomy of medical subject terms compiled and maintained by the National Library of Medicine. Searching the medical journal literature via our EBSCOHost platform utilizing specific medical subject heading terms rather than keywords, can result in a more efficient, productive, and successful search. Please invest a few minutes of your time viewing this tutorial and then do a practice search or two in our full text EBSCO databases. UMHS / IUON subscribes to these online resources with full text for the benefit of our students and faculty.


Raising your level of expertise in essential information searching skills will serve you well throughout your medical career. Remember ~ dynamic evidence-based medical practice depends first on finding the current best evidence!

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Visual Medical Dictionary

Check out this Visual Medical Dictionary!
Just enter a disease, drug or therapy name and not only do the definitons appear but you can also see where the term lives in the MeSH structure, and you are presented with a visual drug-disease relationship diagram.
Brought to you by CHI ~ CureHunter ~ Precision Medical Data Mining.

Labels: , , ,