Program Uncovers Hidden Connections In The Literature

It seems like such an obvious idea once it's stated: With the explosive growth of scientific literature and the concomitant fragmentation of the scientific community into narrow specialties, there must be undisclosed connections lurking. Suppose one field of science has linked medical condition A with symptom B, and a completely different field has linked dietary deficiency C with that same symptom B. The literature then would contain an implicit logical link between A and C, but unless a resea

Written byRobert Finn

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PROGRAM DEVELOPER: Don R. Swanson, professor emeritus of information science at the University of Chicago, has developed a computer program that will allow systematic searching for links in scientific literature.

The idea may be obvious--in fact, it has been discussed by scholars and philosophers of science for decades--but it took the distinguished information scientist Don R. Swanson, professor emeritus of information science at the University of Chicago, to prove it. Not only has he found repeated examples of such implicit relationships in the medical literature, but he has developed a computer program that will allow such relationships to be searched systematically. Although Swanson's work has been hailed from within the information science community, there are some criticisms of his approach, and biomedical researchers have been slow to jump on the bandwagon.

Swanson prefers to call his approach text-based informatics. Other enthusiasts, such as Michael D. Gordon, professor of computer and ...

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