Toward discovery support systems: A replication, re-examination, and extension of Swanson's work on literature-based discovery of a connection between Raynaud's and fish oil

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. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.