> Various forms of functions described as Tanimoto similarity and Tanimoto distance occur in the literature and on the Internet. Most of these are synonyms for Jaccard similarity and Jaccard distance, but some are mathematically different. Many sources[3] cite an unavailable IBM Technical Report[4] as the seminal reference.
Huh! Worldcat says that a few copies are available. Now I want to see if I can get a copy. :)
I recently had to talk to a library archivist to track down what turns out to be a key paper which describes a practical topological encoding of a molecule for a computer. The author published it as a corporate white paper. If you look at the publications from the 1950s and 1960s you'll see people who cite the whitepaper, but as it wasn't part of the standard scientific literature, it wasn't saved, and no one has referenced that work for decades.
As it happens, he's also the person who coined "information retrieval", and was one of the influential founders of IR. Thus, his papers were archived, and still accessible.
One of the interesting things about hard-to-find papers like this is to see how the citations change over time, as typos get introduced and propagate.
"How much bold, radical, totally unpublishable (in any respectable journal) work is out there waiting to be dusted off and used to start new fields of study?"
No doubt quite a bit. I'm always reminded of the FFT, which was rediscovered in 1965 by Cooley and Tukey in the 1950s. It was first invented by Gauss, 160 years earlier, but not well known, "being published only posthumously and in neo-Latin".
As a culture, is it better to investigate more of the history, or spend time learning how to create this sort of thing?
One of the key measures in chemical similarity is the "Tanimoto", better known as the Jaccard similarity. Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaccard_index :
> Various forms of functions described as Tanimoto similarity and Tanimoto distance occur in the literature and on the Internet. Most of these are synonyms for Jaccard similarity and Jaccard distance, but some are mathematically different. Many sources[3] cite an unavailable IBM Technical Report[4] as the seminal reference.
Huh! Worldcat says that a few copies are available. Now I want to see if I can get a copy. :)
I recently had to talk to a library archivist to track down what turns out to be a key paper which describes a practical topological encoding of a molecule for a computer. The author published it as a corporate white paper. If you look at the publications from the 1950s and 1960s you'll see people who cite the whitepaper, but as it wasn't part of the standard scientific literature, it wasn't saved, and no one has referenced that work for decades.
As it happens, he's also the person who coined "information retrieval", and was one of the influential founders of IR. Thus, his papers were archived, and still accessible.
One of the interesting things about hard-to-find papers like this is to see how the citations change over time, as typos get introduced and propagate.
"How much bold, radical, totally unpublishable (in any respectable journal) work is out there waiting to be dusted off and used to start new fields of study?"
No doubt quite a bit. I'm always reminded of the FFT, which was rediscovered in 1965 by Cooley and Tukey in the 1950s. It was first invented by Gauss, 160 years earlier, but not well known, "being published only posthumously and in neo-Latin".
As a culture, is it better to investigate more of the history, or spend time learning how to create this sort of thing?