There's a deep connection between what I do and text retrieval in general. Take a look at the early work in IR in the 1940s and 1950s, at https://en.wikipedia.

There's a deep connection between what I do and text retrieval in general. Take a look at the early work in IR in the 1940s and 1950s, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval#Timeline 1947, "Hans Peter Luhn (research engineer at IBM since 1941) began work on a mechanized punch card-based system for searching chemical compounds" 1950s, "invention of citation indexing (Eugene Garfield)" - Garfield's earlier work was with chemical structure data sets, and his PhD work was on the linguists of chemical compound names. 1950: "The term "information retrieval" was coined by Calvin Mooers." - that was presented at an American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting that year, and in the 1940s Mooers developed an early version of what is now called a connection table, hand-waved a substructure search algorithm which was implemented a few years later. (I'm a Mooers fanboy!) Many of the early IR events were at ACS meetings - the concept of an "inverted index" was presented at one, as I recall. This is because in the 1940s, chemical search was Big Data, with >1 million records containing many structured data search fields, and demand for chemical record search from many organizations. So many of the core concepts are the same, though in cheminformatics we've switched to a lossy encoding of molecular features to a bitstring fingerprint since we tend to look more at global similarity than local similarity, and there are a lot of possible features to encode. Thank you for writing that it was a very readable paper. I have received very little feedback of any sort about the publication, and have been worried that it was too verbose, pedantic, or turgid.