How to use, and influence, consumer social communications to improve business performance, reputation, and profit.

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Don R. Swanson has undertaken a program of research to use the published medical literature as a source of discoveries. We have attempted to replicate his discovery of a connection between Raynaud's disease and dietary fish oil, as well as develop computer-based searching methods that could usefully support literature-based discoveries. We have been successful in replicating Swanson's discovery and have developed a method of discovery support based on the complete text of MEDLINE records. From these, we compute statistics based both on the frequency of tokens within a literature and on the number of records containing various tokens. We discuss the use of these statistics, suggesting that token and record frequencies are good indicators of literatures profitably related to some source literature, and that relative record frequencies are useful in isolating literatures with the potential of containing a discovery.

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We report experiments that use lexical statistics, such as word frequency counts, to discover hidden connections in the medical literature. Hidden connections are those that are unlikely to be found by examination of bibliographic citations or the use of standard indexing methods and yet establish a relationship between topics that might profitably be explored by scientific research. Our experiments were conducted with the MEDLINE medical literature database and follow and extend the work of Swanson.

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a statistical technique for improving information retrieval effectiveness. Here, we use LSI to assist in literature‐based discoveries. The idea behind literature‐based discoveries is that different authors have already published certain underlying scientific ideas that, when taken together, can be connected to hypothesize a new discovery, and that these connections can be made by exploring the scientific literature. We explore latent semantic indexing's effectiveness on two discovery processes: uncovering “nearby” relationships that are necessary to initiate the literature based discovery process; and discovering more distant relationships that may genuinely generate new discovery hypotheses. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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