Medical subject headings (MeSH): subheadings
2004 version 2
24 May 2004
Subheadings
MeSH terms may also be combined with particular subheadings. There are over 80 sub-headings which describe particular aspects of, or particular ways of looking at, the subject concerned. Several of these - trends, epidemiology, prevention & control, and physiology, may be seen in the MeSH terms field of the record shown in Appendix 1 . You can see they are preceded by a forward slash. A full list of subheadings with the two-character codes to be used when searching in command mode are given in Appendix 5 . Not all subheadings may be applied to all indexing terms. Where a subheading cannot be applied to a particular MeSH term it is because it would not make sense to do so.
After selecting a subject heading, the system takes you to the subheadings display. Here is a part of the display for Coronary Disease:
Figure 24: Subheadings for Coronary Disease
As an estimated 50% of articles in MEDLINE are inadequately or incorrectly classified by subheading, they are best only used for general information about a well defined topic. Prevention & Control is one possible subheading that is relevant to the question and our topic is sufficiently broad to try this approach.
1. Have a look at the options and think about whether any of the subheadings are appropriate;
2. In this case you select (tick) Prevention & Control;
3. Scroll to the top of the screen and select
After the subheading screen you are returned to the Main Search page with the result of these steps. We have effectively covered two of the concepts in the search, coronary heart disease and prevention.
Figure 25: Result of search for Coronary Disease where explode and subheading options are selected
If the subheading was not included, we would need to search for the concept of prevention. If this was done the subheading risk would be suggested, which explodes to include the term risk factors. This will be used in a later search.
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