Department News
New Software Bridges Ivory Towers

The National Institute of Mental Health today awarded a $3.4 million, five-year grant to support development of a new interactive computer system. The new software will enable scientists all over the world in virtually any scientific pursuit to conduct high-speed searches for unknown or unexpected but useful links to data from other branches of research. Neil R. Smalheiser, MD, Ph.D., assistant professor in psychiatry at UIC will lead the effort, which will be carried out with collaborators in UI Urbana-Champaign, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California, San Diego and the Stanley Foundation, based in Bethesda, MD.

The software is dubbed "Arrowsmith" in honor of the hero of the 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Sinclair Lewis.

Arrowsmith finds and displays terms common to each of two distinct files of academic journal articles. To use the system, a researcher conducts two simple Medline searches. Articles found in these searches automatically become input for secondary searches, looking for words and phrases common to both records. A stop-list weeds out unhelpful matched words and phrases, such as "the," and "results." Finally, for each remaining term, the system prints and juxtaposes the titles of papers in each file that contain that term, thereby highlighting a small subset of the two literatures. The user can then assess whether a useful relationship exists between two distinct areas of research.

"This process can reveal new, useful information that could not otherwise be inferred from any single review of existing literature," Smalheiser said. For example, in the realm of physiology, many studies have shown that magnesium naturally blocks channels that pass calcium into cells. In the separate field of research on migraine headaches, calcium channel blockers have long been hailed as a useful treatment for migraine. In a practice trial, Arrowsmith turned up 11 similar, separate pairs of literature that suggested magnesium should have a relationship to migraine. "But nobody tested this hypothesis until Don Swanson (Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago) did the Arrowsmith analysis and published a paper pointing out this possible relationship," Smalheiser said.

Current search systems fall into one of two categories. They are either very broad, and tend to report hundreds of useless links. Or they are very precise, which means they are likely to miss prospective links. "Arrowsmith offers the best of both types of search tools in that it searches many large, far-flung fields of science, so it has a very broad reach," Smalheiser said. "But its filtering system refines the matches found so the end result is quite likely to help users find valuable, previously unknown links that may help further their research," he said. The system can be used free of charge by accessing the website http://kiwi.uchicago.edu.