The multilingual thesaurus DeCS/MeSH – Health Science Descriptors/Medical Subject Headings – was created by BIREME to serve as a unique language in indexing articles from scientific journals, books, congress proceedings, technical reports, and other types of materials, as well as for searching and retrieving subjects from scientific literature from information sources available on the Virtual Health Library (VHL) such as LILACS, MEDLINE, and others.
It was developed from MeSH – Medical Subject Headings of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) with the purpose of permitting the use of common terminology for searching in multiple languages, providing a consistent and unique environment for the retrieval of information.
DeCS/MeSH is part of the LILACS Methodology and is an integrating component of the Virtual Health Library.
DeCS/MeSH takes part in the NLM’s unified terminology development project, UMLS – Unified Medical Language System, contributing with MeSH terms in Portuguese and Spanish.
In addition to the terms originated from MeSH, exclusive categories were developed covering the specific areas of Science and Health, Health Surveillance, Public Health, Homeopathy, and Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine.
The concepts that characterize the DeCS/MeSH vocabulary are organized in a tree structure allowing a search on broader or narrower terms or on all terms from the same tree within the hierarchical structure.
DeCS/MeSH is a dynamic vocabulary totaling 34,387 descriptors and 77 qualifiers, of which 30,454 come from MeSH, and 3,310 are exclusively DeCS. DeCS’s unique categories and descriptor totals are: Science and Health (330); Homeopathy (1907); Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine (110); Public Health (2761); and Health Surveillance (818). As it is a dynamic vocabulary, it has a never-ending process of growth and change, among alterations, substitutions and creation of new terms or areas.
With the creation of the national, institutional and thematic VHLs, search strategies were made available in the various topics in order to facilitate the retrieval of the existing literature.
The updating annually performed in MeSH and the modifications also carried out in the other DeCS categories demand the revision and update of the search strategies on the thematic areas of each BVS, especially the ones including hierarchical codes. Therefore, it is advised that the team responsible for their creation also make sure that these strategies can be revised annually before implementing them.
In addition to the NLM, which governs annual updates, BIREME/PAHO/WHO has the support of the following partners in the development and updating of DeCS/MeSH:
- Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Chile for the translation of concepts into American Spanish;
- Instituto de Salud Carlos III for the translation of concepts into European Spanish;
- Institut National de la Santé et de Recherche Médicale, INSERM, that provides the translation of MeSH concepts to French; and
- L‘Université de Rouen, Normandie, for the translation into French of concepts in exclusive DeCS categories.
See the How to Use DeCS/MeSH Guide for more guidance.
Last update: March, 2023
