Arrowsmith was a literature-based discovery system built by Don R. Swanson using the concept of undiscovered public knowledge. He called it Arrowsmith: ‘An intellectual adventure’

Introduction

The tool has a

search Searching may refer to: Music * "Searchin', Searchin", a 1957 song originally performed by The Coasters * Searching (China Black song), "Searching" (China Black song), a 1991 song by China Black * Searchin' (CeCe Peniston song), "Searchin" (C ...

mode that assists the user 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 an openly accessible, free database which includes 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 Institute ...

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 or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

: the first search defines "literature A" and the second defines "literature C." The program then generates a "B-list" of words and phrases found in the titles of both sets of literature. The B-list is displayed ranked by relevance, and can be restricted to certain

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

categories (e.g.

anatomical Anatomy () is the branch of morphology concerned with the study of the internal 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 scien ...

regions, or disorders, or

drug A drug is any chemical substance other than a nutrient or an essential dietary ingredient, which, when administered to a living organism, produces a biological effect. Consumption of drugs can be via insufflation (medicine), inhalation, drug i ...

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

hypothesis A hypothesis (: hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. A scientific hypothesis must be based on observations and make a testable and reproducible prediction about reality, in a process beginning with an educated guess o ...

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

magnesium Magnesium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), 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 ...

deficiency, which was also clinically proved to exist. Intrigued by these findings, Swanson and Neil Smalheiser of the University of Illinois at Chicago developed Arrowsmith, a piece of

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

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 has two meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity. The molecular gene is a sequence of nucleotides in DNA that is transcribed to produce a functional RNA. There are two types of molecular genes: protei ...

s with

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

s and find possible new uses for

medication Medication (also called medicament, medicine, pharmaceutical drug, medicinal product, medicinal drug or simply drug) is a drug used to medical diagnosis, diagnose, cure, treat, or preventive medicine, prevent disease. Drug therapy (pharmaco ...

Related projects

* Author-ity: identify MEDLINE articles written by a particular individual * Anne O'Tate: 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 and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

electronic lab notebook *

ADAM Adam is the name given in Genesis 1–5 to the first human. Adam is the first human-being aware of God, and features as such in various belief systems (including Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism and Islam). According to Christianity, Adam ...

: another database of abbreviations in MEDLINE

References

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Introduction

History

Impact

Related projects

See also

References