MeSH Publication Type Headings and Introduction Years

MeSH Publication Types are a controlled vocabulary of publication genres and characteristics used to tag items in MEDLINE/PubMed. The dataset includes Publication Type Heading and Year columns, indicating when each type was introduced. It is maintained by the National Library of Medicine and was last updated in 2023.

Use Cases

• Analyzing trends in publication genres over time using the Year column.
• Enhancing PubMed search filters by mapping Publication Type Headings to specific document types.
• Building classifiers to automatically tag biomedical articles with their publication type.
• Studying the evolution of scientific communication formats within MEDLINE records.

Strengths

• Data originates from the authoritative National Library of Medicine MeSH vocabulary.
• Includes temporal data via the Year column for historical analysis.

Limitations

• Unknown row count and dataset size limits assessment of comprehensiveness.
• Contains only two columns, offering limited descriptive features per record.

Provenance

Source

National Library of Medicine (datadiscovery.nlm.nih.gov)

Collection Method

Curated as part of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) controlled vocabulary.

Freshness

Last updated in 2023.