The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is one example of a controlled vocabulary. It can be used while searching the MEDLINE database via PubMed or OVID.
- Created and maintained by the National Library of Medicine
- Subject headings are applied to every article indexed in PubMed to identify key topics of the publication
- Reduces need to think of synonyms and natural language descriptions
- MeSH database allows you to search for the controlled term using keywords and build a search to use in PubMed