Undergraduate Medical Education

Subject headings are assigned descriptors, similar to hashtags but from a controlled vocabulary, used in some databases to uniformly capture a concept. Learn more about Subject headings by consulting the Health Sciences Literature Searching Basics Guide.

MeSH is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus developed and maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for indexing articles in the biomedical literature.

• Using MeSH in Pubmed  (3 min 02)
• Using Subject headings in Ovid databases (with a focus on MeSH used in MEDLINE) (4 min 35)

EMTREE is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus developed by Elsevier for indexing articles in the biomedical and life sciences literature. Similar to MeSH terms used in PubMed and Medline, Emtree terms are used to describe the subject matter of articles indexed in Embase. 

CINAHL stands for the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature. It is a comprehensive research database that provides indexing and abstracting for journals in the fields of health sciences, nursing and allied health professions. It uses its own thesaurus and CINAHL subject headings.