Don Swanson has published a number of papers exploring his idea of undiscovered public knowledge. Using bibliographic analysis, he finds previously links between published information that had not been known by researchers.
For example, he discovered that two bodies of literature--one on the circulatory disorder Raynaud's disease and the other on the circulatory effects of dietary fish oil--had no direct connection (i.e., no researcher had yet used fish oil to treat Raynaud's disease), but did suggest a connection worth exploring through his unique bibliographic analysis.
Swanson suggests that there are many other disconnected fragments of knowledge in the literature to which his analysis would be able to make connections.
Swanson and others have developed software called Arrowsmith to do this kind of searching.
Some citations:
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