When you search PubMed, the majority of the results you get back are indexed in MEDLINE. A big part of that indexing process is assigning each article around 10 to 12 Medical Subject Headings.This vast system is organized into a hierarchical structure, descending from 16 top-level categories.
MeSH Category Graph takes a MEDLINE search and shows how the concepts in your results stack up against these categories. For each search you'll see two graphs — one showing percentages compared to those for all of MEDLINE and another showing relative proportion. Once you have completed at least two searches, you can compare the proportions of one search against another.
It is instructive to see where the proportions for a given search land. For example, a search for "medicine" returns results where the proportion of MeSH headings in each category is roughly the same as for MEDLINE as a whole. A search for "taxes" on the other hand involves a much greater proportion of "Health Care" than average, and a lot less "Diseases". Articles about the gene "p53" are much more likely to focus on concepts under "Chemicals and Drugs" or "Phenomena and Processes", and so on.
Please note that the information provided here comes ultimately from the National Center for Biotechnology Information and is subject to the terms listed under their Disclaimer and Copyright notice.
Feel free to us this tool as you wish, but if you use a Category Graph for publication, I'd appreciate a citation:
Sperr E. MeSH Category Graph [Internet]. 2016 [cited your_date_here]. Available from http://esperr.github.io/mesh-cat-graph/
MeSH Category Graph is a experimental project of Ed Sperr, M.L.I.S.
Ed can be reached at ed_sperr@hotmail.com or esperr@uga.edu.
MeSH Category Graph is lashed together with bailing wire and and jQuery. It utuilizes NCBI's Entrez Programming Utilities for searching PubMed and Google Charts for visualizing the graphs. Responsive layout made easier with Bootstrap.
You can find the source code for this application at GitHub.
Want to have even more fun with MEDLINE visualizations? Check out MeSH Subheading Graph and PubVenn.