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. His particular method has been used as a model for further work, and is often referred to as Swanson linking. He was an investigator in the Arrowsmith System project,[1] which seeks to determine meaningful links between Medline articles to identify previously undiscovered public knowledge. He had been professor emeritus of the University of Chicago since 1996, and remained active in a post-retirement appointment until his health began to decline in 2009.
In December 1959 he attended the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, speaking on 'Engineering Aspects' in a symposium on the uses of data processing equipment in anthropology.[6] By 1961 he was a member of the National Science Foundation's Science Information Council.[7]
In the 1980s Swanson pioneered literature-based discovery in the biomedical domain, building the Arrowsmith System around a discovery method that has since become known as Swanson linking.[8] He hypothesized that the combination of two separately published results indicating an A-B relationship and a B-C relationship are evidence of an unknown or unexplored A-C relationship. He used this to propose fish oil as a treatment for Raynaud syndrome, due to their shared relationship with blood viscosity.[9]
From 1992 to 1996 Swanson was professor of the biosciences collection division and the humanities division at Chicago. In 1996 he became professor emeritus.[2]
In 2000, Swanson was awarded the ASIST Award of Merit, the highest honor of the society, for his "lifetime achievements in research and scholarship."[10][11]
Current Research and Development in Scientific Documentation No. 2 (Technical report). Ramo-Wooldridge Corp. 1958. pp. 31–32. NSF-58-20.
H. P. Edmundson, ed. (1960). "The Nature of Multiple Meaning". Proceedings of the National Symposium on Machine Translation. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall.
An experiment in automatic text searching, word correlation and automatic indexing, Phase 1, Final Rept (Technical report). Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc. 1960. Report C82-OU.
(with Paul L. Garvin and Jules Mersel) "Ramo-Wooldridge". Current Research and Development in Scientific Documentation. 8: 85. May 1961.
"Information Retrieval: State-of-the-Art". Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference 1961. Western Joint Computer Conference. Glendale, California. 1960.
(with Christine Montgomery) Montgomery, Christine; Swanson, Don R. (October 1962). "Machinelike Indexing By People". American Documentation. 13 (4): 359–366. doi:10.1002/asi.5090130401.
Cicely M. Popplewell, ed. (1963). "Interrogating a Computer in Natural Language". Information Processing 1962. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co. pp. 288–293.
Paul L. Garvin, ed. (1963). "The Formulation of the Retrieval Problem". Natural Language and the Computer. New York.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Swanson, Don R. (January 1965). "The Evidence Underlying the Cranfield Results". The Library Quarterly. 35: 1–20. doi:10.1086/619296.
Joseph Spiegels; Donald E. Walker, eds. (1965). "On Indexing Depth and Retrieval Effectiveness". Second Congress on the Information System Sciences (Proceedings). Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books. pp. 311–319.
(ed. with Abraham Bookstein) Operations Research Implications for Libraries: Conference Proceedings. 1972.
"On Force, Energy, Entropy, and the Assumptions of Metapsychology". Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science. 5: 137–. 1976.
"A Critique of Psychic Energy as an Explanatory Concept". Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 25 (3). 1977. doi:10.1177/0003065177025003 (inactive 1 November 2024).{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
Swanson, D. R. (1986). "New Horizons in Psychoanalysis: Treatment of Necrosistic Personality Disorders". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 29 (4): 493–498. doi:10.1353/pbm.1986.0006. PMID3748769.
Swanson, Don R. (1986). "Undiscovered public knowledge". Library Quarterly. 56 (2): 103–118. doi:10.1086/601720.
Swanson, D. R. (1986). "Fish oil, Raynaud's syndrome, and undiscovered public knowledge". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 30 (1): 7–18. doi:10.1353/pbm.1986.0087. PMID3797213.
Swanson, Don R. (1988). "Migraine and magnesium: Eleven neglected connections". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 31 (4): 526–557. doi:10.1353/pbm.1988.0009. PMID3075738.
Swanson, Don R. (1990). "Somatomedin C and arginine: Implicit connections between mutually-isolated literatures". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 33 (1990): 157–186. doi:10.1353/pbm.1990.0031. PMID2406696.
"Integrative mechanisms in the growth of knowledge: A legacy of Manfred Kochen". Information Processing & Management. 26 (1): 9–16. 1990. doi:10.1016/0306-4573(90)90005-M.
C. L. Brogman, ed. (1990). "The absence of co-citation as a clue to undiscovered causal connections". Scholarly Communication and Bibliometrics. Newbury Park, CA.: Sage Publ. pp. 129–137.
A. Bookstein, ed. (1991). "Complementary structures in disjoint science literatures". SIGIR91 Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Chicago, Oct. 13–16, 1991. New York: ACM. pp. 280–9.
"Intervening in the life cycles of scientific knowledge". Library Trends. 41 (4): 606–631. 1993.
"Historical Note: Information Retrieval and the Future of an Illusion". Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 29 (2): 92–98. March 1998.
(with Neil R. Smalheiser) "Implicit text linkages between Medline records: Using Arrowsmith as an aid to scientific discovery". Library Trends. 48 (1): 48–59. 1999.
^Swanson, Don Richard. 2001. “ASIST Award of Merit Acceptance Speech on the Fragmentation of Knowledge, the Connection Explosion, and Assembling Other People’s Ideas.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 27 (3): 12–14.
