Quality of pharmacy-specific Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) assignment in pharmacy journals indexed in MEDLINE

Fernando Minguet; Teresa M Salgado; Lucienne van den Boogerd; Fernando Fernandez-Llimos

doi:10.1016/j.sapharm.2014.11.004

Quality of pharmacy-specific Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) assignment in pharmacy journals indexed in MEDLINE

Res Social Adm Pharm. 2015 Sep-Oct;11(5):686-95. doi: 10.1016/j.sapharm.2014.11.004. Epub 2014 Nov 22.

Authors

Fernando Minguet¹, Teresa M Salgado², Lucienne van den Boogerd³, Fernando Fernandez-Llimos⁴

Affiliations

¹ Valencian Pharmacy Practice Research Group, Valencia, Spain.
² Department of Clinical, Social, and Administrative Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan, MI, USA.
³ Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
⁴ Research Institute for Medicines (iMed.ULisboa), Department of Social-Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. Electronic address: f-llimos@ff.ul.pt.

PMID: 25498253
DOI: 10.1016/j.sapharm.2014.11.004

Abstract

Background: The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is the National Library of Medicine (NLM) controlled vocabulary for indexing articles. Inaccuracies in the MeSH thesaurus have been reported for several areas including pharmacy.

Objectives: To assess the quality of pharmacy-specific MeSH assignment to articles indexed in pharmacy journals.

Methods: The 10 journals containing the highest number of articles published in 2012 indexed under the MeSH 'Pharmacists' were identified. All articles published over a 5-year period (2008-2012) in the 10 previously selected journals were retrieved from PubMed. MeSH terms used to index these articles were extracted and pharmacy-specific MeSH terms were identified. The frequency of use of pharmacy-specific MeSH terms was calculated across journals.

Results: A total of 6989 articles were retrieved from the 10 pharmacy journals, of which 328 (4.7%) were articles not fully indexed and therefore did not contain any MeSH terms assigned. Among the 6661 articles fully indexed, the mean number of MeSH terms was 10.1 (SD = 4.0), being 1.0 (SD = 1.3) considered as Major MeSH. Both values significantly varied across journals. The mean number of pharmacy-specific MeSH terms per article was 0.9 (SD = 1.2). A total of 3490 (52.4%) of the 6661 articles were indexed in pharmacy journals without a single pharmacy-specific MeSH. Of the total 67193 MeSH terms assigned to articles, on average 10.5% (SD = 13.9) were pharmacy-specific MeSH. A statistically significant different pattern of pharmacy-specific MeSH assignment was identified across journals (Kruskal-Wallis P < 0.001).

Conclusions: The quality of assignment of the existing pharmacy-specific MeSH terms to articles indexed in pharmacy journals can be improved to further enhance evidence gathering in pharmacy. Over half of the articles published in the top-10 journals publishing pharmacy literature were indexed without a single pharmacy-specific MeSH.

Keywords: Evidence-based practice; Medical subject headings; Periodicals as topic; Pharmaceutical services; Pharmacists; Pharmacy.

MeSH terms

Abstracting and Indexing / standards*
MEDLINE / standards*
Medical Subject Headings*
National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
Periodicals as Topic*
Pharmacy*
Quality Control
Terminology as Topic
United States