TOWARD DISCOVERY SUPPORT SYSTEMS - A REPLICATION, REEXAMINATION, AND EXTENSION OF SWANSONS WORK ON LITERATURE-BASED DISCOVERY OF A CONNECTION BETWEEN RAYNAUDS AND FISH-OIL

Don R. Swanson has undertaken a program of research to use the publish ed 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 bee n successful in replicating Swanson's discovery and have developed a m ethod of discovery support based on the complete text of MEDLINE recor ds. From these, we compute statistics based both on the frequency of t okens within a literature and on the number of records containing vari ous tokens. We discuss the use of these statistics, suggesting that to ken and record frequencies are good indicators of literatures profitab ly related to some source literature, and that relative record frequen cies are useful in isolating literatures with the potential of contain ing a discovery.