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What are Medical Subject Headings aka MeSH?

The MeSH thesaurus is used by National Library of Medicine (NLM) for indexing articles from 5,400 of the world's leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE®/PubMED® database. It is also used for the NLM-produced database that includes cataloging of books, documents, and audiovisuals acquired by the Library. Each bibliographic reference is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the item. Similarly, search queries use MeSH vocabulary to find items on a desired topic.

--Fact Sheet Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) from the US National Library of Medicine

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