Health Systems & Policy: PubMed Help

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) are a defined set of concepts used in PubMed that provide uniformity and consistency to the literature you find. They are a distinctive feature used in the PubMed search engine. In order to find literature, specifically for social concepts in PubMed, it helps to know some MeSH terms that can help your searches. You'll want to use these terms in combination with keywords or other MeSH terms that speak to the particular issue hand. For example, you might combine the keywords "poverty" or "maternal health" with one of the MeSH terms below.

MeSH Terms

MeSH Terms represent concepts found in the literature. Some helpful MeSH Terms for health systems and policy queries are:

• Health Policy
• Legislation as Topic
• Organization & Administration
• Policy Making
• Public Health Administration
• Public Policy

MeSH Subheadings

MeSH Subheadings are qualifiers that can be attached to MeSH Terms. They are used to describe an aspect of a MeSH Term. Some helpful subheadings are:

• organization & administration
• legislation & jurisprudence
• standards
• statistics & numerical data