Medical Subject Headings

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is an online controlled vocabulary that lists words, groups of synonyms and related concepts, for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences that facilitates searching.

It was created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it permits searching at various levels of specificity and allows retrieval of documents in different languages. MeSH is also used by ClinicalTrials.gov registry to classify which diseases are studied by trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov.

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