Every year, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) updates its list of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)* to take into account new terminology or commonly-used phrases that have now officially entered the health care lexicon and may be described in the literature. Outdated terms are also retired. Galter librarians enjoy scanning the new MeSH list to see what NLM has decided is now worthy of inclusion. Here’s a selection of the terms added for 2016.

Blogs (publication type)

Censorship, Research

Clinical Studies as a Topic

Clinical Study (publication type)

Concierge Medicine

Cloud Computing

Cold Injury

Compassion Fatigue

Culturally Appropriate Technology

Diet, Vegan

Diplomacy

Near Miss, Healthcare

Time Out, Healthcare

Vegans

Vegetarians

 

* 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 (and Ovid MEDLINE) use MeSH vocabulary to find items on a desired topic. MeSH terms can be assigned to items deposited into the Galter Health Sciences Library-maintained institutional repository, DigitalHub, for greater discoverability. MeSH on Demand is a new tool that can automatically identify relevant MeSH terms from text such as an abstract or grant summary.