Shelly Warwick, MLS, Ph.D – Permission is granted to reproduce and edit this work for non-commercial educational use as long as attribution is provided and the edited work is also available under the same terms of license.

After this Unit You should Be Able to Define a “controlled vocabulary” Understand the advantage(s) of using a controlled vocabulary in searching Be able to state some examples of a controlled vocabulary

Controlled Vocabularies Controlled vocabularies are lists of terms (a single word or a number of words) that can be used to describe individual items. Used to Find concepts and subjects, not text They are assigned by humans Terms may be assigned that aren’t present as text in the individual items Most databases that use a controlled vocabulary offer the option to limit a search to a subject field

Advantages of Controlled Vocabulary Make sure like things are described using like terms If You say heart attack and I say Myocardial Infarction Could lead to not finding items via a keyword search If the same term is assigned to each article no matter which term the author uses – and a searcher uses the assigned term – they will get a better search result

Examples of Controlled Vocabulary MeSH – Medical Subject Headings – used in Medline, PubMed, other health science database UMLS – Unified Medical Language System –developed by the NIH – National Library of Medicine to integrate and distribute key terminology, classification and coding standards