Rediscovering Don Swanson: the Past, Present and Future of Literature-Based Discovery

Abstract

The late Don R. Swanson was well appreciated during his lifetime as Dean of the Graduate Library School at University of Chicago, as winner of the American Society for Information Science Award of Merit for 2000, and as author of many seminal articles. In this informal essay, I will give my personal perspective on Don's contributions to science, and outline some current and future directions in literature-based discovery that are rooted in concepts that he developed.

Figure 1

Don R. Swanson.

Figure 2. Screenshot of UCSC Genome Browser showing the sequence for human mir-95 juxtaposed to tracks for genomic repeats

The genomic region of the mir-95 sequence corresponds to two LINE2 elements in opposite orientations. This provides evidence that, when transcribed into RNA, these LINE2 elements bind each other, creating the hairpin secondary structure that permits the processing of this sequence by enzymes (Drosha and Dicer) to form a microRNA (Smalheiser and Torvik, 2005).

Figure 3. Schematic diagram illustrating the One Node Search

Reprinted from Swanson & Smalheiser (1997) with permission.