Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a way to keep track of for the purpose of journal articles and books in the life sciences; it can also serve as a thesaurus that makes searching easier. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE/PubMed article database and by NLM's catalog of book holdings.
MeSH was introduced in 1963. The yearly printed version was discontinued in 2007 and MeSH is now available online only.[1] It can be browsed and downloaded free of charge through PubMed. Originally in English, MeSH has been translated into numerous other languages and allows retrieval of documents from different languages.