Each 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 Outdated terms are also retired.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. 471 new MeSH Headings, plus three new Publication Types, were added to MeSH in 2018.

Here’s a selection of terms that caught our eye.

•     Academic Failure
•     Agent Orange
•     Animal Fur
•     Animal Scales
•     Body Contouring
•     Body Packing
•     Cell Phone Use
•     Food Addiction
•     Food Intolerance
•     Gender-based Violence
•     Graphic Novels as Topic
•     Multitasking Behavior
•     Narrative Medicine
•     Occupational Stress
•     One Health
•     Popular Culture
•     Procrastination
•     Scholarly Communication
•     Science in Literature
•     Science in the Arts
•     Virtual Reality
•     Water Sports

* 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 also be assigned to items deposited into the Galter Health Sciences Library-maintained institutional repository, DigitalHub , for greater discoverability.