Name:	DeCS - Health Science Descriptors
Publisher:	BIREME
Type:	Taxonomy
Categories:	General Health & Medicine
Description:	The DeCS was created for use in indexing articles from scientific journals, books, congress proceedings, technical reports, and other types of materials, as well as for searching and retrieving subjects from scientific literature in LILACS, MEDLINE and other data bases. It was developed from MeSH - Medical Subject Headings of the US National Library of Medicine, and expanded to include the categories Public Health and Homeopathy. Its main objective is to serve as a unique language for indexing and information retrieval among the components of the Latin American and Caribbean System on Health Sciences Information, coordinated by BIREME, and that includes 37 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, permitting uniform communication within approximately 600 libraries in the region.
Total Terms:	51261
Top Terms:	130
Preferred Terms:	26262
Non-Preferred Terms:	24999
Relationships:	13523
Levels:	10
Notation Scheme:	No
Notation Description:
Relationship Types:	Associative, Equivalency, Hierarchical
Notes Fields:	Definition, Indexer Guidelines, Other, Scope
Multilingual:	Yes
Languages:	English, Portuguese, Spanish (American)
Additional Information:	DeCS can be searched by keyword, exact term or browsing the index. In addition to the English language terms, the Spanish and Portuguese versions each have another 26,262 preferred terms, plus 23,641 non-preferred terms in the Spanish version and 27,599 non-preferred terms in the Portuguese version.
Revision Cycle:	Annual
Last Updated:	2003
Formats:	Public Website
Informational URL:	http://decs.bvs.br/I/decswebi.htm
Online/Download URL:	http://decs.bvs.br/I/homepagei.htm