The paper summarizes the research progress of knowledge discovery based on disjoint literature, discusses the progress of Arrowsmith as well as its' ranking control indexes, overviews the representative research achievements in this fields from the following angles: words frequency statistics, semantic control, combination between words frequency statistics and semantic control, mutual information method, co-word clustering method, theme clustering method, etc. It also points out the deficiency of Swanson method as well as its broad prospects in future scientific development.