Table of Contents: 2014 NOVEMBER–DECEMBER No. 401
Schulman J. What's New for 2015 MeSH. NLM Tech Bull. 2014 Nov-Dec;(401):e6.
What's New for 2015 MeSHMeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus which is updated annually. NLM uses the MeSH thesaurus to index articles from thousands of biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMed database and for the cataloging of books, documents, and audiovisuals acquired by the Library.
Please consult the 2015 online Introduction to MeSH for more details. Lists of new and changed vocabulary are available at these links:
Neuroanatomy content in the Central Nervous System tree [A08.186] was updated to reflect the current progress in neurobiomedical science and to accommodate search and retrieval of literature in brain connectome and related disciplines. This update was validated by projects such as the White House BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative and the hippocampal spatial representation research by the Laureates for the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 2014. In summary, 451 new terms in 108 existing Descriptors; and 281 new terms in 54 newly created Descriptors were added.
The UNII Project, started in 2013, is a collaborative effort between NLM and Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) informatics scientists to include FDA Substance Registration System (SRS) - Unique Ingredient Identifiers (UNIIs) in MeSH. NLM continues to add FDA-SRS UNII unique identifiers to MeSH pharmaceutical compounds and now has over 11,000 concepts defined by UNII. In 2014, coverage was expanded to include drug absorption pathways and other processes that determine the fate of drugs. The Pharmacologic Actions tree was also expanded to include 48 new headings and a new major category “Metabolic Side Effects of Drugs and Substances" was created to accommodate a broad variety of side effects that drugs have on the cytochrome P-450 system. For additional information see, A New System of Registry Number Identifiers for Chemicals in the MeSH Database.
MeSH on Demand, launched in May 2014, was developed to allow an easy way to identify relevant MeSH terms for text up to 10,000 characters (such as manuscript abstract, summary statement or description of a project) automatically. In the first full month of operation, 140,940 requests were made to MeSH on Demand. For additional information on MeSH on Demand see, MeSH on Demand Tool: An Easy Way to Identify Relevant MeSH Terms and MeSH on Demand Update: How to Find Citations Related to Your Text.
By
Jacque-Lynne Schulman
MeSH Section
