Searching with DeCS terms is a guarantee of best outcomes

The 2019 edition of the Descriptors in Health Sciences vocabulary - DeCS 2019 - was launched in June with some technological and terminological developments. Developed from the MeSH - Medical Subjects Headings - vocabulary of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the DeCS serves as a unique language for indexing articles from scientific journals, books, congress annals, technical reports, and other types of materials . It is also used in the search and recovery of scientific literature issues in the sources of information available in the Virtual Health Library (VHL) such as LILACS, MEDLINE and others.

In this edition, 609 new descriptors, also called concept terms, were incorporated. Of these, 189 are related to the specificities of PAHO's strategic lines regarding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), covering the topics of Universal Access to Health and Universal Health Coverage, Equity, Gender, and Digital Health. Besides these, within the scope of a Technical CooperationTerm between the National Health Foundation of Brazil (FUNASA) and PAHO/WHO Brazil, 29 Public Health descriptors and Environmental Health Engineering were added to DeCS, especially in the Enviromental health subcategory .

Regarding Digital Health, 42 descriptors and Gender, 31 descriptors were included, extending the scope and specificity of these current issues, in addition to many other terms inserted as alternatives. Also, throughout the exclusive DeCS hierarchies, 57 descriptors used for Universal Health Access and Coverage and another 30 descriptors were added, covering the area of ​​Equity. 

The remaining 422 are from the MeSH updates, integrated after an extensive harmonization study with pre-existing terms in the DeCS. Below is the 2019 update of the DeCS vocabulary. The descriptors in each new category (list below) can be viewed through the link
 

As a result of this effort, among the ten subcategories that most received new descriptors in 2019, five of them are exclusive subcategories of DeCS, which corresponds to 38% of the new descriptors.

In 2019, a new management system was also developed to use unpublished information contained in the MeSH data in the English, Spanish, Portuguese and French languages, which were previously not used due to limitation of the management system.
 

According to Renato Murasaki, Manager of Methodologies and Information Technologies and Administration of Information Sources of BIREME, “this development will allow BIREME to improve the mechanisms of interoperability of information sources and integration of new vocabularies in the indexing of contents, the which may offer a thesaurus management service in health sciences that complements the DeCS / MeSH and responds to the specific needs of the VHL thematic networks ”.