Tip #61: Mismatched MeSH in EBSCOhost APA PsycInfo

You may have noticed that some references in EBSCOhost APA PsycInfo have two subject heading sections. One is labeled--somewhat ambiguously--Subjects; the other is more clearly marked as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Subjects are, of course, from the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.

According to APA, "approximately 33% of APA PsycInfo records are cross-listed in PubMed," and the MeSH field in APA PsycInfo was introduced in 2016. A logical assumption, then, is that records since that date would include MeSH and that the terms in that section would match exactly what appears in whatever flavor of MEDLINE you search (EBSCOhost MEDLINE, PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE). But no!

Here's an example, using the article 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction induces brain changes similar to traditional long-term meditation practice—A systematic review (doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2016.07.001). These are the relevant sections from that reference in EBSCOhost APA PsycInfo:

Here's the MeSH for the same article in EBSCOhost MEDLINE:

Comparing the two, Stress, Psychological is missing from the MeSH in the APA PsycInfo reference. In addition, there are no subheadings applied to any of the MeSH terms visible in APA PscyInfo. That's a chronic issue in the database: even if all the MeSH terms are listed, subheadings are dropped.

Here are the MeSH sections for this article from, respectively, PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE, which match EBSCOhost MEDLINE:

One more MeSH-y situation you may encounter: some references have no MeSH terms, even though they are indexed in MEDLINE.

To sum up:

• Not all records that appear in both MEDLINE and APA PsycInfo have MeSH in the APA PsycInfo record.
• No MeSH in APA PsycInfo have subheadings.
• There may be discrepancies between APA PsycInfo's MeSH and MEDLINE's (e.g., the APA PsycInfo record may be missing terms).

So why does it matter, since it's unlikely you'll be searching APA PsycInfo to learn how MeSH has been applied to references? Well, at the very least, it's misleading to have MeSH terms that don't accurately show how a reference was indexed in MEDLINE. But it's also worth noting that all of the controlled vocabulary field codes in EBSCOhost APA PsycInfo search either both the APA Thesaurus and MeSH (DE, SU, MM, MJ) or, in the case of one field code (MA), MeSH alone. (You can learn more about this in Tip #60: Controlled vocabulary field codes and their discontents in EBSCOhost APA PsycInfo.) Because of this, it's essential to remember that the MeSH indexing it's searching may not even be complete and accurate.

Are you an Ovid user? In Ovid APA PsycInfo, the MeSH terms have the same inaccuracies! So while Ovid's field searching options do allow you to search only one of the controlled vocabulary fields, the incomplete MeSH may still be relevant to your searches.