Undiscovered Public Knowledge
Abstract
Knowledge can be public, yet undiscovered, if independently created fragments are logically related but never retrieved, brought together, and interpreted. Information retrieval, although essential for assembling such fragments, is always problematic. The search process, like a scientific theory, can be criticized and improved, but can never be verified as capable of retrieving all information relevant to a problem or theory. This essential incompleteness of search and retrieval therefore makes possible, and plausible, the existence of undiscovered public knowledge. Three examples intended to throw light on the logic of undiscovered knowledge are constructed and analyzed. The argument is developed within the framework of a Popperian or critical approach within science and on Popper's distinction between subjective and objective knowledge--the distinction between World 2 and World 3.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Kell, D. B. (2009) · BMC Medical Genomics · doi:10.1186/1755-8794-2-2 · Cited by 554 · see citing works
Swanson, D. R. (2006) · Medical Hypotheses · doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2006.01.006 · Cited by 81 · see citing works
Self-citationDiscovering discoveries: Identifying biomedical discoveries using citation contexts
Small, H., Tseng, H., & Patek, M. (2017) · Journal of Informetrics · doi:10.1016/j.joi.2016.11.001 · Cited by 47 · see citing works
Baek, J., Jauhar, S. K., Cucerzan, S., & Hwang, S. J. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.342 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
Pitts, J. B. (2016) · Annals of Physics · doi:10.1016/j.aop.2015.12.002 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
- Authors
- Swanson, D. R.
- Corresponding author
- Swanson, Don R.
- Venue
- The Library Quarterly
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1986-04
- Volume
- 56
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 103-118
- ISSN
- 0024-2519 (ISSN-L)
- 1549-652X
- OpenAlex
- W2054473834
- Cited by
- 370
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 21 · 2017: 15 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 16 · 2014: 34 · 2013: 13 · 2012: 12
- FWCI
- 16.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The Library Quarterly (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Library Science and Information
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Science and Libraries
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
- Keywords
- information retrieval, epistemic logic
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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