Abstract
Recent efforts to make some of the relationships within MeSH more explicit have led to a deeper understanding of the nature of these relationships. This chapter will explore the relationships represented in MeSH in the light of that understanding. Every term that occurs may be thought of as representing a concept. One or more terms, comprising one or more concepts, grouped together for important reasons, form a descriptor class. The descriptor class is the basic building block of the thesaurus. Relationships among concepts can be represented explicitly in the thesaurus, most notably as relationships within the descriptor class. Hierarchical relationships are at the level of the descriptor class. The hierarchies are key in allowing expanded retrievals. The hierarchical relationships, traditionally thought of as broader or narrower (parent-child) relationships, are better understood as representing broader and narrower retrieval sets. Nevertheless, these hierarchical relationships often reflect important broader-narrower relationships between preferred concepts in descriptor classes. Other types of relationships present in the thesaurus include associative relationships, such as the Pharmacologic Actions or see-related cross references, as well as forbidden combination expressions, such as the Entry Combination.
Keywords
- Descriptor Class
- Medical Subject Heading
- Hierarchical Relationship
- Unify Medical Language System
- Prefer Term
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bachrach, C. A. & Charen, T. (1978). Selection of MEDL1NE contents, the development of its thesaurus, and the indexing process. Medical Informatics, 3, 237–254.
Harper, C. R. (1989). Associative relationships in the MeSH thesaurus. Associate Project Report. National Library of Medicine.
Maniez J. (1988). Relationships in thesauri: Some critical remarks. International Classification, 15, 133–138.
Maron, M. E. (1977). On indexing, retrieval, and the meaning of about. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 28, 38–43.
McCray, A. T. & Hole, W. T. (1990). The scope and structure of the UMLS semantic network. In Miller, R. A. (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Symposium on Computer Applications to Medical Care, pp. 126–130. New York. IEEE Computer Society.
National Information Standards Organization. (1994). Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Thesauri. Bethesda, MD: NISO Press. (ANSI/NISO Z39.19–1993).
Nelson, S. J., Aronson, A. R., Doszkocs, T. E., Wilbur, W. J., Bodenreider, O., Chang, H. F., Mork, J., & McCray, A. T. (1999). Automated assignment of Medical Subject Headings. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Symposium Supplement, 1127.
Schuyler, P. L., Hole, W. T., Tuttle, M. S., & Sherertz, D. D. (1993). The UMLS metathesaurus: Representing different views of biomedical concepts. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 81, 217–222.
Soergel, D. (1985). Organizing Information. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nelson, S.J., Johnston, W.D., Humphreys, B.L. (2001). Relationships in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). In: Bean, C.A., Green, R. (eds) Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge. Information Science and Knowledge Management, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9696-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9696-1_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5652-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9696-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive