Rocky 2022

Research progresses through the process of making the unknown unknowns into known unknowns, then into knowns. We aim to illuminate this process by helping students, researchers, funders, and publishers better understand the state of our collective scientific knowledge and ignorance (known unknowns) in order to help accelerate translational research through the process of identifying questions that need answers in relation to a topic or experimental results. Many knowledge-bases exist, but no ignorance-bases until now. We create the first ignorance-base that captures these statements of ignorance driven by the entailed goal for scientific knowledge from the scientific literature by combining biomedical concept recognition and ignorance classification. We used the ignorance-base to help a student not only find new avenues to explore based on a topic, but also elucidate how questions are asked and how those change over time. We also used the ignorance-base to help researchers contextualize their gene list in our collective scientific ignorance to find questions that bear on it from another discipline. For both, we present a new method, ignorance-enrichment, to find the over-represented biomedical concepts in ignorance statements, meaning that there is more unknowness in relation to the topic or gene list than expected. While these ideas and methods are generally applicable across biomedical research, we chose to focus on the prenatal nutrition field and literature because of its global public health impact. If we can identify the questions in prenatal nutrition to start, then we can look to other fields and knowledge-bases for answers.