Frequently Asked Questions

MeSH on Demand is a tool that identifies MeSH vocabulary in a submitted text (such as an abstract). MeSH on Demand uses the NLM Medical Text Indexer (MTI) to provide a list of suggested MeSH vocabulary matching terms in the text submitted.

MeSH on Demand also provides a list of PubMed citations related to the text submitted.

And MeSH on Demand allows the user to initiate a PubMed search based on the identified MeSH vocabulary.

There is also a link provided from each MeSH on Demand identified MeSH vocabulary term to the MeSH Browser record.

The MeSH Browser retrieves MeSH vocabulary records (MeSH Descriptors, Publication Types, Qualifiers, and Supplemental Concepts) from the MeSH vocabulary when they partially or exactly match a MeSH Browser query of 200 characters or less.

The Mesh Browser query is based on text-word searches for Mesh vocabulary, or of various fields in a MeSH vocabulary record, such as the Annotation, Scope Note, Pharmacological Action, or Registry Number fields.

The MeSH Browser also provides links between MeSH records related to each other within the MeSH vocabulary and displays their hierarchical relationship via the MeSH Tree Structure views.

The limit is approximately 5 pages depending on text size and spacing (or 10,000 characters). When the limit is approached, a warning is shown. If the limit is exceeded the text box will be locked from further input, and you will need to click the Reset button and start over.

Typically, the process will take somewhere between 30 to 45 seconds to provide a response. Including more text will slow the results.

For best results, provide well-defined sentences. Long lists without sentence breaks require more processing and may end without any results. If the submitted text contains non-ASCII characters such as α (alpha) or β (beta), the system attempts to convert the text to ASCII before processing with MTI.

If you have a non-English text to submit, please use a translator to convert it to English before submitting it to MeSH on Demand for accurate results.

The Medical Text Indexer used by MeSH on Demand, runs an English-scientific-based language analyzing system to identify MeSH vocabulary. If you enter words from other languages that spell an English or English scientific word, you might get a different result than what you were expecting. For example, the Spanish phrase for the MeSH vocabulary term “Origin of Life” is “origen de la vida” but when entered into MeSH on Demand, the language analyzer finds a match for the Spanish word “origen” but not as the translated meaning “origin”. Instead it finds the chemical N-(3,4,5-trimethoxybenzoyl)azocidine which has the word “origen” as a MeSH Entry Term.

Also, non-Latin alphabetic letters and letters with diacritic symbols are not supported in this application, such as Greek letters and letters with accent marks (for example tildes and umlauts). They will be will stripped away and replaced with a space.

If the keywords you want to find in the MeSH vocabulary contain a non-alphabetic letter or diacritic symbol, it is best to convert them to an alphabetic equivalent before submitting your text. For example, convert “α” to “alpha” and “β” to “beta”.

When MeSH on Demand’s PubMed search is initiated, the chosen terms will appear in a PubMed search box. Other words can be added to the PubMed search box. Also, the search operators (AND, OR, and NOT) can be included in the PubMed search box.

The highlighted words are terms that have been identified by MeSH on Demand as matching terms from the MeSH vocabulary. When the cursor is placed over the highlighted text, the term from the MeSH Term list (to the right of the processed text) will light up to indicate the MeSH vocabulary match.

In addition to identifying MeSH vocabulary found in the submitted text, MeSH on Demand also suggests MeSH vocabulary found in PubMed related citations. These MeSH vocabulary terms are suggested because in the PubMed literature they often co-occur with the MeSH vocabulary identified in the submitted text.

For instance, when user text contains “Zika Virus” MeSH on Demand suggests relevant terms “Pregnancy; Female; Zika Virus Infection; Pregnancy Complications, Infectious” because of Zika virus infection related pregnancy complications.

MeSH on Demand uses NCBI’s PubMed Related Citations algorithm to identify citations in which the similarity between documents is measured by the words they have in common.

MeSH on Demand returns the identified MeSH vocabulary in ranked weighted order of the predicted relevance to the submitted text.

For more information see here.

MeSH on Demand automatically expands the PubMed search to include all MeSH Entry Terms as search terms. For instance, when MeSH term “Hybrid Vigor” is chosen as a PubMed search term, MeSH on Demand automatically uses its MeSH synonym “Heterosis” in the PubMed search, resulting in roughly double the retrieved articles found in PubMed. This automatic expansion of the search to include all the MeSH Entry Terms is particularly helpful in finding articles that have not yet been indexed or that are from non-MEDLINE journals.