Don R. Swanson (October 10, 1924 – November 18, 2012) was an American information scientist, most known for his work in literature-based discovery in the biomedical domain. His particular method has been used as a model for further work, and is often referred to as Swanson linking. He was an investigator in the Arrowsmith System project, which seeks to determine meaningful links between Medline articles to identify previously undiscovered public knowledge. He had been professor emeritus of the University of Chicago since 1996, and remained active in a post-retirement appointment until his health began to decline in 2009.

Life

Swanson was born in Los Angeles on October 10, 1924, the son of Harry Windfield and Grace Clara (Sandstrom) Swanson. He served with the United States Navy Reserve from 1942 to 1926, and received his B.S. in Physics at Caltech, Pasadena, California in 1945. He gained his M.A from Rice Institute, Houston, Texas, two years later, and then a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1952. From 1952 to 1954 Swanson worked as a computer systems analyst at Hughes Aircraft Company Research and Development Laboratories in Culver City, California. In 1955 had joined Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. Initially working as a research scientist, by 1959 he was manager of the Synthetic Intelligence Dept. at Ramo-Wooldridge. There he led a project contracted to the Council on Library Resources, with Noam Chomsky and Paul L. Garvin as linguistic advisors, to investigate machine indexing of 'a small experimental library of scientific text (ca. 300,000 words)'. Swanson collaborated further with Garvin on Russian-English machine translation, considering problems of polysemy, in work funded by the Rome Air Development Center. In December 1959 he attended the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, speaking on 'Engineering Aspects' in a symposium on the uses of data processing equipment in anthropology. By 1961 he was a member of the National Science Foundation's Science Information Council. In 1963 Swanson joined the University of Chicago as a professor in the Graduate School of Library Science. He also served as dean of the graduate school from 1963 to 1972, from 1977 to 1979 and again from 1987 to 1989. From 1972 to 1976 he was a research fellow at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. In the 1980s Swanson pioneered literature-based discovery in the biomedical domain, building the Arrowsmith System around a discovery method that has since become known as Swanson linking. He hypothesized that the combination of two separately published results indicating an A-B relationship and a B-C relationship are evidence of an unknown or unexplored A-C relationship. He used this to propose fish oil as a treatment for Raynaud syndrome, due to their shared relationship with blood viscosity. From 1992 to 1996 Swanson was professor of the biosciences collection division and the humanities division at Chicago. In 1996 he became professor emeritus. In 2000, Swanson was awarded the ASIST Award of Merit, the highest honor of the society, for his "lifetime achievements in research and scholarship."

Works