  In this document, we report an analysis of the Public MeSH Note field of the
new descriptors introduced in the MeSH thesaurus between 2006 and 2020. The aim
of this analysis was to extract information about the previous status of these
new descriptors as Supplementary Concept Records. The Public MeSH Note field
contains information in semi-structured text, meant to be read by humans.
Therefore, we adopted a semi-automated approach, based on regular expressions,
to extract information from it. In the large majority of cases, we managed to
minimize the required manual effort for extracting the previous state of a new
descriptor as a Supplementary Concept Record. The source code for this analysis
is openly available on GitHub.
