PubMed

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary, a standard collection of terms used to index article contents.

Medical Subject Headings

• MeSH terminology imposes uniformity and consistency to the indexing of the biomedical literature.
• Searching using MeSH pulls together all articles on a concept including synonyms (myocardial infarction/heart attack) and allows for spelling variations (estrogen/oestrogen).

When searching for a MeSH term such as flu in the MeSH database, the results will include:

• The entry term translated to MeSH terminology: Influenza, human.
• A display of Subheadings.
  (If none are selected, results will include results with or without the subheadings;
  if two (2) or more are selected, then results will include  citations that include any of the subheadings selected.)
• A display of a MeSH term in the hierarchy of terms, for example: