DeCS – Health Sciences Descriptors is a structured and trilingual
thesaurus
A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea:
Synonym diction ...
created by
BIREME
A bireme (, ) is an ancient oared warship ( galley) with two superimposed rows of oars on each side. Biremes were long vessels built for military purposes and could achieve relatively high speed. They were invented well before the 6th century BC ...
–
– in 1986 for
indexing scientific journal
In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research.
Content
Articles in scientific journals are mostly written by active scientists such ...
articles, books, proceedings of congresses, technical reports and other types of materials, as well as for searching and recovering scientific information in
LILACS
The Literatura Latino-Americana e do Caribe em Ciências da Saúde (in Portuguese), acronym LILACS, and previously called Latin American Index Medicus,Piegas MH, Nowinski A. Index Medicus Latino-Americano: exemplo de cooperação técnica entre p ...
,
MEDLINE
MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medic ...
and other databases. In the
VHL,
Virtual Health Library
The Virtual Health Library (VHL) (Biblioteca Virtual en Salud, BVS) is an institution that employs the World Wide Web to "improve access to reliable, locally relevant information n health and health sciencesfor health-professionals, researcher ...
, DeCS is the tool that permits the navigation between
records and sources of information through controlled concepts and organized in
Portuguese, Spanish and English.
It was developed from
MeSH
A mesh is a barrier made of connected strands of metal, fiber, or other flexible or ductile materials. A mesh is similar to a web or a net in that it has many attached or woven strands.
Types
* A plastic mesh may be extruded, oriented, e ...
–
Medical Subject Headings
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. It serves as a thesaurus that facilitates searching. Created and updated by the United States ...
from the
NLM –
U.S. National Library of Medicine
The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library.
Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. Its ...
– in order to permit the use of common terminology for searching in three languages, providing a consistent and unique environment for
information retrieval regardless of the language. In addition to the original MeSH terms, four specific areas were developed:
Public Health
Public health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals". Analyzing the det ...
(1986),
Homeopathy
Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine. It was conceived in 1796 by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. Its practitioners, called homeopaths, believe that a substance that causes symptoms of a di ...
(1991),
Health Surveillance (2005), and Science and Health (2005).
The concepts that compose the DeCS vocabulary are organized in a
hierarchical structure
A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an important ...
permitting searches in broader or more specific terms or all the terms that belong to a single hierarchy.
Its main purpose is to serve as a unique language for indexing and recovery of information among the components of the Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Information System, coordinated by BIREME and that encompasses 37 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, permitting a uniform dialog between nearly 600 libraries.
DeCS participates in the unified terminology development project,
UMLS –
Unified Medical Language System
The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences (created 1986). It provides a mapping structure among these vocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various termin ...
of the NLM, with the responsibility of contributing with the terms in Portuguese and Spanish.
UMLS - MeSH Spanish
References
{{reflist
External links
DeCS – Health Sciences DescriptorsDeCS on BIREME's WikiBIREME – Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences InformationVHL Regional Portal – Virtual Health LibraryNLM – U. S. National Library of MedicineLILACS Methodology
Health sciences
Library cataloging and classification
Medical terminology
Thesauri