Musings on MeSH

Around here, January is MeSH Month. It’s when NLM and NNLM staff highlight the new and updated MeSH terminology, offer training on how your PubMed searches may be affected by the MeSH updates, and answer your MeSH and indexing questions. Mark your calendar for our 2024 sessions – if you use PubMed, you won’t want to miss them!   NLM Webinar: 2024 MeSH Highlights January 10, 12-1pm CT Register NNLM Class: MeSH Changes and PubMed Searching January 25, 12-1:30pm CT Register   In preparation for these sessions, I found myself reflecting on the MeSH conversations I’ve had this year. Several librarians expressed their disappointment with automated indexing, and some shared specific examples of inaccurately assigned MeSH terms. The plenary session at the MLA Midwest Chapter Conference in October further delved into this concern. Speaker Alexandre Amar-Zifkin presented findings from a study he and his colleagues at the Université de Montréal conducted. While teaching PubMed searching to students, they had experienced embarrassing moments of finding inaccurate or missing MeSH for key concepts of an article. They decided to review a sample of records with automated indexing from early 2023 to determine whether their main concepts were adequately represented with MeSH. They developed a methodology, ran the review, and concluded that 47% of the records had minor or major MeSH issues that would have affected their likelihood of retrieval. The team shared their finding...
Source: The Cornflower - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Blog Source Type: news