The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus is a controlled and hierarchically organized vocabulary produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). MeSH keywords are chosen from this controlled thesaurus and are tagged onto publications. Learn more about the NLM process.
MeSH plus terms are extracted from the Title and Abstract using synonyms from the MeSH thesaurus. A word or phrase is likely to have more matches in MeSH Plus than in the MeSH keywords field due to this process i.e. a keyword hit in the document text may not warrant a MeSH term tag. Because of the comprehensive nature of MeSH Plus, we recommend using this field to achieve more content-relevant results.
Below is a table comparing the two, sourced from PMID 27919317:
| MeSH Keywords | MeSH Plus |
| Animals Drosophila Proteins Drosophila melanogaster Feeding Behavior Gene Expression Insulin Larva Neprilysin Neuropeptides Organisms, Genetically Modified Proteolysis Signal Transduction |
Animals Body Size Developmental Biology Disease Drosophila Drosophila Proteins Drosophila melanogaster Eating Ectopic Gene Expression Epidemiology Eukaryota Feeding Behavior Gene Expression Global Health Humans Hydrolysis Insulin Larva Metabolism Metalloproteases Neprilysin Neuropeptides Organisms, Genetically Modified Peptides Phenotype Physiological Processes Production Proteolysis Role Signal Transduction Stem Cells |