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HSLS Cleans up Medical Subject HeadingsYou may not see them, but HSLS staff members are working behind the scenes to make your PITTCat searches even more effective. Times change and so does the standard terminology of the medical field. Terms in the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) thesaurus, as maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), reflect this process. Older headings are regularly updated, and new headings added to keep pace with current developments. At HSLS, a massive clean up of the MeSH headings used in PITTCat began in July 2002. Older subject headings are being revised to the current forms, and heading format is being changed to conform with current NLM cataloging practice, similar to the style of indexing in MEDLINE. How does this improve your searching success? Now, old and new materials on the same topic are united under a single subject heading. Before, you might have to search under “Drug Addiction”, “Drug Dependence”, “Substance Abuse”, and several other subject headings to find all appropriate materials on this topic. Now, all related materials can be found through a single search, using the term “Substance-Related Disorders”. Thus you will be able to find the materials you need in fewer steps, and with less likelihood of missing any. (See accompanying Search Tips sidebar). As part of the clean-up, we also have been working with other Pitt libraries to update MeSH headings on their PITTCat records. This also increases your ability to locate and identify materials relevant to your work, by including in that same search additional materials held by other Pitt libraries. These improvements to the currency and consistency of MeSH headings in PITTCat offer a strong incentive for using subject searches in your research. Consider the difference between a subject search and a keyword search if you are trying to gather materials on a common or popular term, such as “stress.” A keyword search for the term “stress” yields over 4300 hits, which cover the gamut of meanings for this common word—books on physics, linguistics, computer languages, as well as the psychological and physiological ones you might have expected. By using a subject search, you can obtain a more precise result set that is more accurately focused on your intended meaning of the term. Plus, you have the added benefit of finding scope notes that define the subject heading, and also various cross-references, which may help to identify additional headings pertinent to your work. Subject searching will continue to be supported by HSLS through on-going maintenance of the MeSH headings on our records in PITTCat. Staff members monitor changes in the MeSH vocabulary on a regular basis, and implement changes in records added to the catalog. In addition, we conform to NLM practices for both subject heading content and structure, which harmonize with NLM’s indexing practices. These changes are intended to facilitate cross-file searching and enhance retrieval by assuring that the same terms produce like results for articles, books, and non-print materials. The process of converting all records will take some time, but by springtime you will be able to use MeSH to search PITTCat in the same way you currently use MeSH to search MEDLINE. --Gretchen Maxeiner Millis and Gosia Fort |
