The impact of Medical Subject Headings has been felt throughout the decades. Without MeSH, there would have been no way to categorize or provide a controlled vocabulary for researchers. In perhaps one way, MeSH provided a common language to enable communication and retrieval of information for researchers. “MeSH, in machine-readable form, is provided at no charge via electronic means” (Source). This “no charge via electronic means” allows MeSH to be available and accessible to nearly anyone and, in this way, allows information to be disseminated.
However, MeSH has lost some of its momentum in recent years, due to specialization in medical fields and controlled vocabularies. Informatics are increasingly field-specific, and formal ontologies and detailed metadata are coming to the forefront.
