A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with which terminology?

• A. MeSH terms
• B. LOINC codes
• C. SNOMED-CT terms
• D. ICD-10 codes

Answer: (A)

MEDLINE records are indexed with MeSH terms. MeSH, which stands for Medical Subject Headings, is a controlled vocabulary created by the National Library of Medicine. Each article is assigned relevant MeSH terms that describe its topics. This standardization lets you search by concept rather than by author words alone, and the MeSH hierarchy (broader to narrower terms) lets you expand or narrow searches effectively. In practice, MeSH indexing maintains consistency across articles and improves retrieval accuracy.

Other vocabularies like LOINC, SNOMED-CT, or ICD-10 serve different purposes—LOINC for laboratory tests, SNOMED-CT for clinical terminology in EHRs, and ICD-10 for disease classification in billing and reporting—so they aren’t the indexing terms used for MEDLINE records.