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National Library of Medicine Technical BulletinNational Library of Medicine Technical Bulletin

Table of Contents: 2018 NOVEMBER–DECEMBER No. 425

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What's New for 2019 MeSH

What's New for 2019 MeSH. NLM Tech Bull. 2018 Nov-Dec;(425):e6.

2018 December 13 [posted]

What's New for 2019 MeSH

MeSH is the National Library of Medicine (NLM) controlled vocabulary thesaurus that is updated annually. NLM uses the MeSH thesaurus to index articles from thousands of biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMed database and for the cataloging of books, documents, and audiovisuals acquired by the library.

Overview of changes in the 2019 release of MeSH:

  • 421 New Descriptors
  • 9 Deleted Descriptors
  • 3 Deleted Qualifiers
  • 20 New Publication Types (four used for article indexing)

Current totals by type of terminology

  • 29,351 Descriptors
  • 76 Qualifiers
  • 247,209 Supplementary Concepts Records
    Supplemental Records are updated daily.

MeSH RDF

MeSH RDF, the linked data representation of the MeSH vocabulary, was updated to reflect 2019 MeSH. MeSH RDF includes a downloadable file in N-Triples format, a SPARQL query interface, a SPARQL API, and a RESTful interface for retrieving MeSH data. More information is available from the Medical Subject Heading RDF homepage.

More information

NLM Technical Bulletin National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health