Systematic Reviews

›“… a carefully selected list of words and phrases, which are used to tag units of information (document or work) so that they may be more easily retrieved by a search…Controlled vocabularies reduce ambiguity inherent in normal human languages where the same concept can be given different names and ensure consistency.” -Wikipedia

 

• Created and edited by a "governing body" to introduce new official terms, phase out old ones, and add new mapping for concepts
• Reduces the burden on researchers of a database by mapping human language synonyms to the official term
• Searching by a concept or idea, rather than by the presence of a string of letters

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