Arrowsmith was a

literature-based discovery Literature-based discovery (LBD), also called literature-related discovery (LRD) is a form of knowledge extraction and automated hypothesis generation that uses papers and other academic publications (the "literature") to find new relationships bet ...

system built by

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. His particular method has been used as a model for further work, and is ...

using the concept of undiscovered public knowledge. He called it Arrowsmith: ‘An intellectual adventure’

Introduction

The tool has a

search Searching or search may refer to: Computing technology * Search algorithm, including keyword search ** :Search algorithms * Search and optimization for problem solving in artificial intelligence * Search engine technology, software for findi ...

mode that assists the

user Ancient Egyptian roles * User (ancient Egyptian official), an ancient Egyptian nomarch (governor) of the Eighth Dynasty * Useramen, an ancient Egyptian vizier also called "User" Other uses * User (computing), a person (or software) using an ...

in looking for items or concepts that may be present in common between two distinct sets of articles. Another context for using the search mode is when the user wants to find information that is present in one field that may be relevant to another field of inquiry. The user will be guided through two

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the ...

searches to retrieve bio-medical articles from the

MEDLINE MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medic ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

: the first search defines "literature A" and the second defines "literature C." The

program Program, programme, programmer, or programming may refer to: Business and management * Program management, the process of managing several related projects * Time management * Program, a part of planning Arts and entertainment Audio * Progra ...

then generates a "B-list" of words and phrases found in the titles of both sets of literature. The B-list is displayed

ranked A ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either "ranked higher than", "ranked lower than" or "ranked equal to" the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak order or total preorder of o ...

by relevance, and can be restricted to certain

semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

categories (e.g.

anatomical Anatomy () is the branch of biology concerned with the study of the structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old science, having it ...

regions, or disorders, or

drug A drug is any chemical substance that causes a change in an organism's physiology or psychology when consumed. Drugs are typically distinguished from food and substances that provide nutritional support. Consumption of drugs can be via insuffla ...

s). For each B-term of interest, one can view the titles containing A and B ("AB titles") juxtaposed to the titles containing B and C ("BC titles"). In this manner, one can readily assess whether there appears to be a

biologically Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

significant commonality or relationship between the two sets of articles.

History

Swanson was searching for MEDLINE databases when he found a thread about

Raynaud's disease Raynaud syndrome, also known as Raynaud's phenomenon, eponymously named after the physician Auguste Gabriel Maurice Raynaud, who first described it in his doctoral thesis in 1862, is a medical condition in which the spasm of small arteries cau ...

and dietary

fish oil Fish oil is oil derived from the tissues of oily fish. Fish oils contain the omega-3 fatty acids eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), precursors of certain eicosanoids that are known to reduce inflammation in the body a ...

, which led him into wondering whether fish oil was of value in curing Raynaud's disease. This

hypothesis A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous obse ...

was later proved to be true clinically. Then Swanson hypothesized a connection between

migraine Migraine (, ) is a common neurological disorder characterized by recurrent headaches. Typically, the associated headache affects one side of the head, is pulsating in nature, may be moderate to severe in intensity, and could last from a few hou ...

and

magnesium Magnesium is a chemical element with the symbol Mg and atomic number 12. It is a shiny gray metal having a low density, low melting point and high chemical reactivity. Like the other alkaline earth metals (group 2 of the periodic ta ...

deficiency, which was also clinically proved to exist. Intrigued by these findings, Swanson and Neil Smalheiser of the

University of Illinois at Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a Public university, public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its campus is in the Near West Side, Chicago, Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus esta ...

developed Arrowsmith, a piece of

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

for identifying connections between two Medline articles. Named after the 1925 Sinclair Lewis novel, it was aimed to build a systematic and computational method of finding possible links between articles.

Impact

The Arrowsmith model proved influential, and the approach Swanson and Smalheiser developed has been adapted to study the

correlation In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics ...

s of

gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "...Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a ba ...

s with

disease A disease is a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not immediately due to any external injury. Diseases are often known to be medical conditions that a ...

s and find possible new uses for

medication A medication (also called medicament, medicine, pharmaceutical drug, medicinal drug or simply drug) is a drug used to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease. Drug therapy (pharmacotherapy) is an important part of the medical field and re ...

Related projects

* Author-ity: identify MEDLINE articles written by a particular individual *

Anne O'Tate Anne O'Tate is a free, web-based application that analyses sets of records identified on PubMed, the bibliographic database of articles from over 5,500 biomedical journals worldwide. While PubMed has its own wide range of search options to identi ...

: summarize, drill-down and browse the results of a PubMed query * WETLAB: an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

electronic lab notebook *

ADAM Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as " ...

: another database of abbreviations in MEDLINE

References

{{Reflist Search engine software

Introduction

History

Impact

Related projects

See also

References