Literature-Based Discovery by Lexical Statistics

We report experiments that use lexical statistics, such as word frequency counts, to discover hidden connections in the medical literature. Hidden connections are those that are unlikely to be found by examination of bibliographic citations or the use of standard indexing methods and yet establish a relationship between topics that might profitably be explored by scientific research. Our experiments were conducted with the MEDLINE medical literature database and follow and extend the work of Swanson.