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.

He was an investigator in the Arrowsmith System project,[1] which seeks to determine meaningful links between Medline articles to identify previously undiscovered public knowledge.

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.

[3] From 1952 to 1954 Swanson worked as a computer systems analyst at Hughes Aircraft Company Research and Development Laboratories in Culver City, California.

[5] Swanson collaborated further with Garvin on Russian-English machine translation, considering problems of polysemy, in work funded by the Rome Air Development Center.