Résumé : In recent years, a plethora of new terms designating various subfields of the life sciences and biomedicine have emerged. These new terms, which are listed in thesauri for the purpose of scientific article indexing, play an essential role in the partitioning of academic disciplines and thus provoke a reorganization of the body of knowledge. However, they are the result of a dynamic interplay between several factors: for sure, those of a scientific nature, but also social, political, and human factors. We performed a comparative analysis, between English and French, of some Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). This was done in order to recapitulate the sequence of events of their genesis and identify those which could explain certain peculiarities of the English and French arborescences, the latter being the French translation of the former. This diachronic study therefore focuses on the process of neology formation; neologisms may become canonical within a given field, often through a symbolic action by a researcher.
