? A companion video is hosted at https://youtu.be/tEPyL-x-R1o.
Don R. Swanson (Oct. 10, 1924 { Nov. 18, 2012) was an American information scientist, known for his work in literature-based discovery in the biomedical sciences. Swanson received his B.S. degree in Physics at Caltech, in 1945, followed by an M.A, and then a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1952. He worked as a physicist at various laboratories until 1963, when he was made a professor and served as dean of the Graduate School of Library Science at the University of Chicago until 1972 and again from 1977{79 and 1987{89. In 2000, he was awarded the ASIST Award of Merit, the highest honor of the society, for his \lifetime achievements in research and scholarship." (Wikipedia). He developed a system called Arrowsmith to obtain meaningful links between MEDLINE articles in the area called `Literature-based Discovery.'
The simple basis of Swanson's idea of what he called `undiscovered public
knowledge' was as follows. He saw that science and the scienti c literature were
divided into many specialties|partly as a result of a spontaneous response of
scientists to the exponential growth of science. Specialties further divided into
sub-specialties, each with its own literature. An unintended consequence of
specialization was fragmentation. Each specialty would have its own community
that would largely restrict itself to its own literature for study, and hence also
for citation. As the total literature grew, the number of specialties (but not in
general the size of each), increased [
The focus here is not accessing a certain body of literature with given keywords, but looking at the relatedness between two bodies of literature. For example, if certain environmental conditions A are known in the Biomedical literature to cause certain symptoms B, and some disease C in the Medical literature has symptoms B then it may be inferred that environmental conditions A could be the cause of disease C. The signi cance of the `information explosion' is therefore not just in the growth of literature but in the combinatorial explosion of \unnoticed and unrecognized" mutual connections. If these knowledge fragments from two (+) complementary and non-interactive literatures are brought together, one may hope to gain useful information.
With the recent introduction of Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval
or BIR [
Neil Smalheiser, Swanson's long term collaborator writes of \problems and
issues which were inherent in Don's thoughts during his life, but which have
not yet been fully taken up and studied systematically" [