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The History of Undiscovered Public Knowledge
A Study of Methods by Don R Swanson
Don R Swanson
Don R. Swanson (October 10, 1924 - November 18, 2012) was an American information scientist, most known for his work in literature-based discovery in the biomedical domain. ~ Wikipedia
Interesting facts:
PhD in Theoretical Physics, UC Berkeley
Dean of Graduate School of Library Science, UIC
ASIST Award of Merit, 2000
Long distance runner: Wrote a paper on Atrial Fibrillation in athletes
Undiscovered Public Knowledge ?
“Knowledge can be public, yet undiscovered, ifindependently created fragments are logicallyrelated but never retrieved, brought together,and interpreted. Information retrieval, althoughessential for assembling such fragments, is alwaysproblematic. The search process, like a scientifictheory, can be criticized and improved, but cannever be verified as capable of retrieving allinformation relevant to a problem or theory. Thisessential incompleteness of search and retrievaltherefore makes possible, and plausible, theexistence of UNDISCOVERED PUBLICKNOWLEDGE.” – Don R Swanson [1]
Evolution
Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper,1959
Undiscovered Public Knowledge, Swanson, 1986
Arrowsmith System, Swanson, 1997
CiteSpace, Epiphanet, MKEM and other new tools
Key Elements of Swanson’s Approach
Complementary but disjoint
articles
Literature based
discovery
New knowledge
Experiments
Fish oil and Reynaud’s Disease, 1986
Migraine and Magnesium, 1988
Atrial Fibrillation in Athletes, 2006
Method
MEDLINE database of titles.
Swanson Linking
LBD Process
Source: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/11/S2/S3
Citation counts Source: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/42899840/undiscovered-public-knowledge
Source: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16367976834530510249&hl=en&as_sdt=400005&sciodt=0,14
Citation counts
Source: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Publication/698075/an-interactive-system-for-finding-complementary-literatures-a-stimulus-to-scientific-discovery
New Systems
CiteSpace II
• Chen, 2006
• Visualizing Patterns and Trends
Epiphanet
• Cohen, 2010
• MEDLINE data
• Extract networks
MKEM
• Ijaz,2010
• Reduces manual intervention
CiteSpace
Source: http://cluster.cis.drexel.edu/~cchen/citespace/
MKEM
Source: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/11/S2/S3
Swanson’s Legacy
Today biologist are beginning to embrace Swanson’s notions [2]
Appearance of journals such as Theoretical biology and Medical Modelling
Fate of Swanson’s methods
Mark A. Spasser (1997) has explored the fate of Swanson’s ideas, using citation context analysis and determined the set of authors who have utilized Swanson’s ideas and where they have utilized them.
Spasser has pointed out that Swanson’s ideas though effective “have not widely cited in the biomedical disciplines” and pointed out the “failed instance of interdisciplinary communication”.
References
1. Swanson, D. R. (1986, April). Undiscovered Public Knowledge. The Library Quarterly, 56(2), 103-118.
2. Bekhuis, Tanja (2006, April). Conceptual biology, hypothesis discovery and text mining: Swanson’s legacy
Thank You
- Shubhanshu Mishra