PubMed

This guide helps users to learn how to use the new and updated PubMed and show them what the new features are and where to find some of the old features.

What is MeSH and How to Access MeSH?

MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings. It is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for PubMed.

You may access the MeSH database via the following ways:

To access by clicking MeSH Database at the bottom of PubMed website.

To access via Advanced Search mode

Tutorials

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) in MEDLINE®/PubMed®: A Tutorial
This tutorial was created by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) on Sept 5, 2019. It is an exploration of how Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) are used for indexing MEDLINE records in PubMed. This tutorial is intended for PubMed searchers.
Searching PubMed with MeSH (handout)

How to Search by MeSH?

Using appropriate MeSH terms will allow you to retrieve very relevant articles in PubMed. If you type a keyword in Basic Search, it will not only search the keyword in all fields but also will map it to a MeSH heading if available. However, this will retrieve many results. For a broad topic, you may get too many results to manage. To search by using MeSH only, it will make your search results more succinct and relevant.

Below is an example to show how to search by MeSH. Enter the search term heart attack in MeSH search box . The term will be mapped to the MeSH heading myocardial infarction.