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/

EpiphaNet

Source: http://epiphanet.uth.tmc.edu/help.html

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