title: Quality of pharmacy-specific Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) assignment in pharmacy journals indexed in MEDLINE.
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.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  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.
authors.affiliation: Valencian Pharmacy Practice Research Group, Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Fernando
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Minguet
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical, Social, and Administrative Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan, MI, USA.
authors.forename: Teresa M
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Salgado
authors.affiliation: Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Lucienne
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: van den Boogerd
authors.affiliation: 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.
authors.forename: Fernando
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Fernandez-Llimos
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000592:standards*; D016239:MEDLINE / Q000592:standards*; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D009317:National Library of Medicine (U.S.); D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D010604:Pharmacy; D011786:Quality Control; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014481:United States
keywords: Evidence-based practice; Medical subject headings; Periodicals as topic; Pharmaceutical services; Pharmacists; Pharmacy