CINAHL Guide | Guía de CINAHL

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus, consists of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity.

In other words, MeSH terms describe what an article is about and are used to label all articles on a topic even if different authors use different words for the same concept (such as cancer vs. neoplasm vs. tumor).

Note that MeSH terms are specific to MEDLINE. The generic name for MeSH terms is "subject headings." In CINAHL, subject headings are called CINAHL Headings. The video below demonstrates how to identify and use CINAHL Headings.