Mapping the biomedical sciences using Medical Subject Headings : a comparison between MeSH coassignments and MeSH citation pairs
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Journal of the medical library associationÉditeur·s
Medical Library AssociationMots-clés
Résumé·s
Objective: This study compares two maps of biomedical sciences using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) term coassignments versus MeSH terms of citing/cited articles and reveals similarities and differences between the two
approaches.
Methods: MeSH terms assigned to 397,475 journal articles published in 2015, as well as their 4,632,992 cited
references, were retrieved from Web of Science and MEDLINE databases, respectively, which formed over 7 million
MeSH co-assignments and nearly 18 million direct citation pairs. We generated six network visualizations of biomedical
science at three levels using Gephi software based on these MeSH co-assignments and citation pairs.
Results: The MeSH co-assignment map contained more nodes and edges, as MeSH co-assignments cover all medical
topics discussed in articles. By contrast, the MeSH citation map contained fewer but larger nodes and wider edges, as
citation links indicate connections to two similar medical topics.
Conclusion: These two types of maps emphasize different aspects of biomedical sciences, with MeSH co-assignment
maps focusing on the relationship between topics in different categories and MeSH direct citation maps providing
insights into relationships between topics in the same or similar category.