Literature-based knowledge discovery: the state of the art

Literature-based knowledge discovery method was introduced by Dr. Swanson in 1986. He hypothesized a connection between Raynaud's phenomenon and dietary fish oil, the field of literature-based discovery (LBD) was born from then on. During the subsequent two decades, LBD's research attracts some scientists including information science, computer science, and biomedical science, etc.. It has been a part of knowledge discovery and text mining. This paper summarizes the development of recent years about LBD and presents two parts, methodology research and applied research. Lastly, some problems are pointed as future research directions.