Shortened forms of written words or phrases used for brevity.

Lists of words, usually in alphabetical order, giving information about form, pronunciation, etymology, grammar, and meaning.

Works consisting of lists of shortened forms of written words or phrases used for brevity. Acronyms are included here.

Computer processing of a language with rules that reflect and describe current usage rather than prescribed usage.

A research and development program initiated by the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE to build knowledge sources for the purpose of aiding the development of systems that help health professionals retrieve and integrate biomedical information. The knowledge sources can be used to link disparate information systems to overcome retrieval problems caused by differences in terminology and the scattering of relevant information across many databases. The three knowledge sources are the Metathesaurus, the Semantic Network, and the Specialist Lexicon.

The premier bibliographic database of the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE. MEDLINE® (MEDLARS Online) is the primary subset of PUBMED and can be searched on NLM's Web site in PubMed or the NLM Gateway. MEDLINE references are indexed with MEDICAL SUBJECT HEADINGS (MeSH).

The terms, expressions, designations, or symbols used in a particular science, discipline, or specialized subject area.

Activities performed to identify concepts and aspects of published information and research reports.

Extensive collections, reputedly complete, of references and citations to books, articles, publications, etc., generally on a single subject or specialized subject area. Databases can operate through automated files, libraries, or computer disks. The concept should be differentiated from DATABASES, FACTUAL which is used for collections of data and facts apart from bibliographic references to them.

Terms or expressions which provide the major means of access by subject to the bibliographic unit.

In INFORMATION RETRIEVAL, machine-sensing or identification of visible patterns (shapes, forms, and configurations). (Harrod's Librarians' Glossary, 7th ed)

Organized activities related to the storage, location, search, and retrieval of information.

Organized collections of computer records, standardized in format and content, that are stored in any of a variety of computer-readable modes. They are the basic sets of data from which computer-readable files are created. (from ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science, 1983)

Structured vocabularies describing concepts from the fields of biology and relationships between concepts.