Student paper award 1974. Systematic searching of abstracts and indexes in interdisciplinary areas

Two trends, the growth of interdisciplinary research and the proliferation of machine‐readable data bases, require that new techniques and tools be applied to facilitate use of scientific and medical literature in support of research. In order to permit systematic searching of multiple data bases to satisfy requests in interdisciplinary areas, a mapping of a portion of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to three other controlled vocabularies has been constructed. A description of the development of the mapping is followed by details of a preliminary test of its effectiveness based on searches in the subject areas of applications of physics and engineering in medicine. The test shows: (1) Index Medicus provides an average of 81% of the citations retrieved in searches using more than one source; (2) in some subject areas use of the mapping does allow an increase in the number of items retrieved, but with a loss in precision. Limitations of the mapping revealed by the test suggest possible alternative applications of the mapping in controlled vocabulary development and in on‐line searching.