Every year, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) updates its list of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)* to take account of new terminology or commonly-used terminology that has now officially entered the health care lexicon. Outdated terms are also retired.
Galter librarians enjoy scanning the new MeSH list to see what NLM has decided is now worthy of inclusion (yes, it’s the little things). Here’s a selection of the terms added for 2013.
- Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
- Breakfast
- Crowdsourcing
- Electronic Nose
- Literature Based Discovery
- Lunch
- Patient Navigation
- Racism
- Singing
- Skin Cream
- Snacks
- Transgendered Persons
While ‘Lunch’, ‘Breakfast’, and even ‘Snacks’ get their own terms, ‘Dinner’ is left out in the cold and covered by the more general ‘Meals’. Maybe next year, ‘Dinner’! The full list of additions can be seen here.
* MeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of terms in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity. Search queries in PubMed use MeSH vocabulary to find items on a desired topic.
Updated: March 5, 2020