Document Type : Original Article(s)
Author
Assistant professor, Library and Information Sciences, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran
Abstract
Abstract Introduction: The subject headings of MeSH in medicine is more than 23,000 which is an index for the medical sciences subjects. This study aims to find the correlation between development of MeSH and increase of medline records to assess the statistical development of medical sciences subjects during the time. Methods: This is an analytical study of the subjects of medical sciences and medline publications index. A sample of one million medline records was selected randomly and the correlation between the increase in the number of medline records and the increase of head titles in MeSH was assessed to answer the two following questions: 1. How has the quantity of medical subjects developed during time? 2. Currently by the production and publication of how many medical scientific papers a new subject might be added to the headings of MeSH? Results: Development of MeSH during the time happened as a logarithm in three different phases. Putting these three phases into one, we found a formula to predict development of MeSH and its headings by the increase of publications in the field. Also, we found that nowadays by the publication of more than 250 papers in various subjects of the medical sciences, a new subject is created and added to MeSH linearly. Conclusion: The results showed that in spite of some ideas, development of scientific subjects is dynamic and is linearly dynamic and will not stop. Keywords: Medline; Subject Headings; Terminology
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