GENERATING NEW KNOWLEDGE BY RETRIEVING INFORMATION
| Pages | 368-372 |
| Date | 01 April 1990 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026868 |
| Published date | 01 April 1990 |
| Author | ROY DAVIES |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
DOCUMENTATION NOTE
GENERATING NEW KNOWLEDGE
BY RETRIEVING INFORMATION
ROY DAVIES
University
Library,
University
of
Exeter,
Stocker
Road,
Exeter EX4 4PT
ROBERTS MAKES AN IMPORTANT POINT in his note [1] when he
draws attention to the limitations of databases both in terms of their coverage
of the literature and their retrieval
capabilities.
These limitations
will
have two
effects on their potential use for creating new knowledge: first, some
'undiscovered public knowledge' (to use Swanson's term for apparently novel
inferences that could be drawn by making connections between facts that are
separated in the existing literature
[2]) will
escape our notice and second, some
of the inferences that are made will turn out not to be new after all since they
will have already been suggested in the literature that was not retrieved or not
covered by the databases.
In the short term there is little that can be done about the first problem,
other than searching
as
widely and
as
thoroughly
as
possible, but in the longer
term improvements in retrieval capabilities can be expected and pressure on
database producers to extend coverage might also yield results. The second
problem, possible lack of originality, would not necessarily be a major
drawback since the evidence acquired by information retrieval may comple-
ment rather than duplicate that reported in the missed documents. This is
exemplified by Swanson's second case study of a derived hypothesis. He drew
attention to a number of apparent connections between magnesium deficiency
and migraine [3]. Since then, in a letter praising Swanson's paper, Weaver
pointed out that he had reached a similar conclusion by a different route and
had carried out an uncontrolled trial of the effects of magnesium supplements
on migraine sufferers with promising results
[4].
Weaver had previously investigated the reasons for the effectiveness of
magnesium sulphate
in
treating preeclampsia, a quite different
disease
that can
affect pregnant
women.
He
concluded that magnesium reduces vasospasm and
platelet aggregation and therefore
when
evidence that migraine
was
associated
with the second of these factors was reviewed by Hanington [5], Weaver
decided to test the usefulness of magnesium in treating that condition too. If
Weaver had not spotted the relevance of Hanington's paper on migraine to his
own work an unnoticed solution to an analogous problem would have existed
in the literature, constituting an example of a different category of un-
discovered public knowledge from those noted by Swanson, but one that had
Journal of Documentation, Vol. 46, No. 4 December 1990, pp. 368-372.
368
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