Thesaural problems in an on-line system.

This paper describes the construction of a synonym thesaurus or entry vocabulary for the SUNY Biomedical Communication Network, which will permit the user greater ease of access to the MeSH-indexed material without previously consulting a printed list of indexing terms. In order to discover the actual terminology used by a researcher, words were extracted from titles of articles appearing in Index Medicus, and compared with the subject heading under which they appeared. As well as strict synonyms, grammatical variants were also included. Work is continuing on relating other indexing vocabularies, such as Excerpta Medica and Current Medical Terminology, used in the biomedical world to MeSH terms.