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. For ease of searching it is also possible to narrow your subject search by applying subheadings such as "diagnosis" or "physiology". If you are an experienced MEDLINE searcher, you may be used to using these subheadings. What you might not realize however is that is also possible to search using "floating" subheadings — returning results where that subheading is attached to any MeSH heading used to index the record.
MeSH Subheading Graph takes a MEDLINE search and shows how the subjects in your results stack up against these subheadings. 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 subheadings in each category is roughly the same as for MEDLINE as a whole. A search for "disease" on the other hand shows a substantial increase in the proportion of results for "etiology" and "diagnosis". Articles about "taxes" show radically different proportions; they are mostly indexed by subjects with the subheading "organization and administration".
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 Subheading Graph for publication, I'd appreciate a citation:
Sperr E. MeSH Subheading Graph [Internet]. 2016 [cited your_date_here]. Available from http://esperr.github.io/mesh-subhead-graph/
MeSH Subheading 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 Subheading Graph is lashed together with bailing wire and jQuery. It utilizes 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 tools like this? Check out Visualizing PubMed.