50th Anniversary of Medical Subject Headings. Collaboration between the BNCS in its translation into Spanish (DecS)

Introduction: On November 18th, NLM marks the 50th anniversary of the Medical Subject headings (MeSH).

MeSH was first published in 1960, although its seeds planted in December 1947; it was noted that the increasing complexity of medical scientific literature necessitated increasingly sophisticated approaches to organization and access.

Medical Subject Headings has translation into Spanish and Portuguese known as Health Sciences Descriptors (DeCS), trilingual and structured vocabulary created in the 1960’s by BIREME (Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information).

Material and methods: Spain collaborates with this project since 2003 and through its Surveillance Terminology Unit belonging to the Spanish National Library of Health Sciences (BNCS) from the Institute of Health Carlos III, which uses the work of experts in medical terminology to carry out two important tasks: from one hand, the translation into Spanish of the new terms that the NLM identifies annually and on the other hand, the revision and adaptation into Spanish of the terms already reflected in the thesaurus.

Results: The main success result of this collaboration is an updated thesaurus specialized on Health Sciences with medical terminology adapted to Spain. Appart from its applications on specialized databases, the Spanish National Library of Health Sciences (BNCS) contributes through DeCS terms in the unified terminology development project, UMLS- Unified Medical Language System of the NLM, with the responsibility of the updating and sending of new terms in Spanish.

Conclusions: This posters attempts to reflect, in a graphic way, the whole role of the Spanish National Library of Health Sciences in this project, explaining the categories already translated, the work still pending, as well as the challenges that may be considered.