Arrowsmith was a literature-based discovery system built by Don R. Swanson using the concept of undiscovered public knowledge.
And so it is that the world of recorded knowledge can yield genuinely new discoveries"The tool has a search mode that assists the user in looking for items or concepts that may be present in common between two distinct sets of articles.
Intrigued by these findings, Swanson and Neil Smalheiser of the University of Illinois at Chicago developed Arrowsmith, a piece of software 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.
[1] The Arrowsmith model proved influential, and the approach Swanson and Smalheiser developed has been adapted to study the correlations of genes with diseases and find possible new uses for medications.