Mapping Science - Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization - page 258

Fig. 8.1 An overview of the structural variation model

In literature-based discovery, Swanson discovered previously unnoticed linkage
between fish oil and Reynaud's syndrome (Swanson 1986a ). In terrorism research,
before the September 11 terrorist attacks, it was widely believed that only those
who directly witness a traumatic scene or directly experience a trauma could have
the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); however, later research had shown
that people may develop PTSD syndromes even by simply watching the coverage of
a traumatic scene on TV (Chen 2006 ). In drug discovery, one of the major challenges
is to find new compound structures effectively in the vast chemical space that satisfy
an array of constraints (Lipinski and Hopkins 2004 ). In mapping scientific frontiers
(Chen 2003 ) and studies in science of science (Price 1965 ), it would be particularly
valuable if scientists, funding agencies, and policy makers can have tools that may
assist them to assess the novelty of ideas in terms of their conceptual distance from
the contemporary domain knowledge. In these and many more scenarios, a common
challenge for coping with a constantly changing environment is to estimate the
extent to which the structure of a network should be updated in respond to newly
available information (Fig. 8.1 ).