Harvesting the Public MeSH Note field

TL;DR

This paper presents a semi-automated method using regular expressions to analyze the Public MeSH Note field, extracting historical information about new descriptors' status with minimal manual effort.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-automated approach for analyzing semi-structured MeSH data, reducing manual effort in extracting historical descriptor information.

Findings

High success rate in extracting previous descriptor status

Open-source code available for reproducibility

Method applicable to large-scale MeSH data analysis

Abstract

In this document, we report an analysis of the Public MeSH Note field of the new descriptors introduced in the MeSH thesaurus between 2006 and 2020. The aim of this analysis was to extract information about the previous status of these new descriptors as Supplementary Concept Records. The Public MeSH Note field contains information in semi-structured text, meant to be read by humans. Therefore, we adopted a semi-automated approach, based on regular expressions, to extract information from it. In the large majority of cases, we managed to minimize the required manual effort for extracting the previous state of a new descriptor as a Supplementary Concept Record. The source code for this analysis is openly available on GitHub.