The enacted fate of undiscovered public knowledge

Abstract

In a series of articles, Don Swanson explores the problem of associating two or more literatures that are logically, or substantively, related, but bibliographically noninteractive. He has called these implicit links among published literatures undiscovered public knowledge. This article explores the fate of Swanson's ideas, using citation context analysis both to determine which authors have utilized Swanson's ideas and to examine the uses to which they have been put. The results suggest that while Swanson has received significant attention from the library and information science community, his ideas have not been widely cited in biomedical disciplines, and, when cited, only with rhetorically dismissive qualifications that detract from their facticity. These results are interpreted as a failed instance of interdisciplinary communication, and several explanations of this failure are discussed. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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