Welcome to the REHABDATA Thesaurus Project
The REHABDATA database provides indexing and informative abstracting for documents from top rehabilitation and disability information sources. The REHABDATA Thesaurus was developed to index the REHABDATA database using the terms and concepts used by the disability and rehabilitation community. It is currently in its 7th edition, reviewed and updated in 2004 and 2005. As a living record of language use in the community, we are reviewing and updating it again in 2010.
Browse through terms alphabetically. Each may include scope notes, broader terms, narrower terms, and related concepts. Each entry also includes a link to searches in the REHABDATA database so you can see how we index the items in our collection.
Nonterms are also called Use For terms or nonpreferred terms. For example, Chronic chorea is nonterm. The entry includes a link to Huntington disease, the preferred term.
How Can You Help?
The Thesaurus is a living document. It is meant to reflect the current usage of terms by professionals and researchers in disability and rehabilitation. Take some time to click through or search the terms and nonterms collected here. Feel free to comment on the entries. Should a term be removed? Are the scope notes out of date? Are there terms that should be included in an entry? If you can cite instances of scholarly or professional usage to support your comments, please consider adding or linking them to your post. You will need to sign up to comment (it's free and we will only use your member information to contact you if we need clarification of your comment or suggestion).
Are we missing a term? If you have a suggestion for adding a new term to the Thesaurus, please submit your suggestion through the contact form.
For more on how you can contribute, see the Thesaurus Wiki Policies.
Version History.
This is the seventh edition of the REHABDATA Thesaurus, formerly titled the Thesaurus of Descriptors and the REHABDATA Thesaurus of NARIC Descriptors. Beginning with the third revised edition (April 1988), and continuing with the fourth (June 1989), fourth revised (December 1992), fifth (December 1994), and sixth (July 1999) edition, entries include when terms were added or deleted, in the form "term added December 1994," or "term deleted December 1992." Many non-terms were added to the fifth edition to make identifying relevant descriptors easier and faster. The Thesaurus exists as a prescriptive document: Rather than defining language use in disability and rehabilitation research, it dictates the grammar and definitions used to describe disability and rehabilitation. In the sixth edition several problems of parallelism among term types were corrected. With the seventh edition, terms were revised to reflect the shifting paradigm of disability and rehabilitation research, as described in NIDRR's Long Range Plan as published in 1999. This edition also includes a revised Introduction and a rotated terms listing that can be used to solve retrieval problems.
Updating the Thesaurus.
The purpose of this Thesaurus Wiki is to invite the disability and rehabilitation community to review the terms and nonterms, comment on their usage, and suggest updates to the terminology. Anyone may read and comment on the terms here. Comments will be collected throughout the year. At the end of the comment period, suggested terms and revisions will be reviewed by a representative group of rehabilitation researchers, service providers, librarians, and people with disabilities. The 8th edition of the Thesaurus will be the result!
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