Technical Notes
OLDMEDLINE Mapping Project - Update
As announced in New Feature for OLDMEDLINE. NLM Tech Bull. 2005 Sep-Oct;(346):e1, NLM® began the OLDMEDLINE Other Term-to-MeSH mapping project in 2005. OLDMEDLINE Other Terms are the original subject headings assigned to citations when they appeared in the print indexes. This project maps those terms to current MeSH® vocabulary and will be maintained each year during year-end processing. As of February 2007, NLM estimates that approximately 89% of the Other Terms are now mapped, an increase of 2% since December 2006, when end-of-year activities were completed. All current MeSH headings added to these records were added as major MeSH headings. Additional work on this project continues.
With the progress of mapping the OLDMEDLINE Other Terms to current MeSH terms, approximately 76% of OLDMEDLINE citations have Other Terms mapped to current MeSH, an increase of 4% since December 2006, when end-of-year activities were completed. Because all Other Terms have been mapped, processing on these citations is considered completed. PubMed® citation status has changed from [PubMed - OLDMEDLINE] to [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]. These records are retrieved when limiting to the MEDLINE® subset, or when searching medline [sb]. Citations from the OLDMEDLINE print index sources that have not had all keywords mapped to current MeSH have the status tag [PubMed – OLDMEDLINE]. A search for oldmedline [sb] identifies these records. See Changes to OLDMEDLINE Records – Status Tag Change, NLM Tech Bull, 2006 Sep-Oct; (352):e3 for additional information on the OLDMEDLINE status tag change.
Additional information on the MeSH Mapping Project and searching OLDMEDLINE citations using MeSH is available from: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/databases_oldmedline.html.
