Professor Peter Willett

Professor of Information Science

MA (Oxford), MSc (Sheffield), PhD (Sheffield), DSc (Sheffield)

Peter Willett obtained an MA in Natural Sciences (Chemistry) from Oxford University. He then came to the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science (as it was then called) at the University of Sheffield in 1975. Following an MSc, PhD and post-doctoral experience he was appointed to a lecturership in 1979, and was awarded a personal chair in 1991.

Teaching

My main teaching area, for both our level-3 BSc students and for all of our taught postgraduate students, is research methods. I am the coordinator for the modules that introduce a range of research methods, both qualitative and quantitative, that students can then use in their subsequent dissertation projects (for which I am also the overall coordinator). This is a very satisfying area in which to teach, especially when a dissertation project results in a subsequent publication in the academic or the professional literature. In addition to these research-related modules, I also act as coordinator for the level-3 module 'Information Systems and the Information Society' and contribute to undergraduate and postgraduate modules in information retrieval and information literacy.

Professional Standing

• Recipient of the Skolnik Award of the American Chemical Society (1993), of the Distinguished Lecturer Award of the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society for Information Science (1997), of the Tony Kent Strix Award of the Institute of Information Scientists (2001), of the Lynch Award of the Chemical Structure Association Trust (2002) of the American Chemical Society Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research (2005), and of the Patterson-Crane Award of the American Chemical Society (2010)
• President (1998-2002) of the Chemical Structure Association
• Chair (2001-03) of the Board of Governors of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre
• Chair of Panel 6 of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and a member of its Research Committee
• Deputy Chair of the RAE 2008 Sub-Panel for Library and Information Management
• Included in Who’s Who in Science and Engineering (1995-) and Who’s Who (2004-)

Research Interests

Bibliometric methods for the evaluation of research productivity; chemoinformatics, in particular the use of clustering, graph theory, and machine learning methods for the processing of databases of chemical and biological structures.

Key publications

Willett, P.  "Similarity methods in chemoinformatics."  Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43, 2009, 3-71.

Papadatos, G., Cooper, A.W.J., Kadirkamanathan, V., Macdonald, S.J.F., McLay, I.M., Pickett, S.D., Pritchard, J.M., Willett, P. & Gillet, V.J., "Analsis of neighbourhood behaviour in lead optimism and array design". Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 49, 2009, 195-208.

Patel, Y., Gillet, V.J., Howe, T., Pastor, J., Oyarzabal, & Willett, P. "Assessment of additive/non-additive effects in structure-activity relationships: implications for iterative drug design".  Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, 51, 2008, 7552-7562.

Willett, P. "From chemical documentation to chemoinformatics: fifty years of chemical information science."  Journal of Information Science, 34, 2008, 477-499.

Hert, J., Willett, P., Wilton, D.J., Acklin, P., Azzaoui, K., Jacoby, E. & Schuffenhauer, A. (2005)   "Enhancing the effectiveness of similarity-based virtual screening using nearest-neighbour information."  Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, 48, 7049-7054.

Raymond, J.W., Gardiner, E.J. & Willett, P. (2002) "RASCAL: Calculation of graph similarity using maximum common edge subgraphs".  Computer Journal, 45, 631-644.

Martin. Y.C. & Willett, P. (Editors) (1998).  Designing Bioactive Molecules: Three-Dimensional Techniques and Applications.  Washington: American Chemical Society.  276 pages.

Gillet, V.J., Willett, P. & Bradshaw, J. (1997) "The effectiveness of reactant pools for generating structurally diverse combinatorial libraries".  Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, 37, 731-740. 

Sparck Jones, K. & Willett, P. (Editors) (1997)  Readings in Information Retrieval.  San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. 589 pages.

Schinke, R., Greengrass, M., Robertson, A.M. & Willett, P. (1996) "A stemming algorithm for Latin text databases".  Journal of Documentation , 52, 172-187.

Robertson, A.M & Willett, P. (1996) "An upperbound to the performance of ranked-output searching: optimal weighting of query terms using a genetic algorithm".  Journal of Documentation, 52, 405-420.

Jones, G., Willett, P. & Glen, R.C. (1995) "Molecular recognition of receptor sites using a genetic algorithm with a description of desolvation".  Journal of Molecular Biology, 245, 43-53.

Artymiuk, P.J., Poirrette, A.R., Grindley, H.M., Rice, D.W. & Willett, P. (1994) "A graph-theoretic approach to the identification of three-dimensional patterns of amino acid side-chains in protein structures.  Journal of Molecular Biology, 243, 327-344. 

Grindley, H.M., Artymiuk, P.J., Rice, D.W. & Willett, P. (1993) "Identification of tertiary structure resemblance in proteins using a maximal common subgraph isomorphism algorithm".  Journal of Molecular Biology, 229, 707-721. 

Robertson, A.R. & Willett, P. (1993) "A comparison of spelling-correction methods for the identification of word forms in historical text databases".  Literary and Linguistic Computing, 8, 143-152.

Popovic, M. & Willett, P. (1992) "The effectiveness of stemming for natural-language access to Slovene textual data".  Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43, 384-390.

Clark, D.E., Willett, P. & Kenny, P.J. (1992) "Pharmacophoric pattern matching in files of three-dimensional chemical structures: use of smoothed bounded-distance matrices for the representation and searching of conformationally-flexible molecules".  Journal of Molecular Graphics, 10, 194-204.

Peat, H.J. & Willett, P. (1991) "The limitations of term co-occurrence data for query expansion in document retrieval systems".  Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42, 378-383.

Cringean, J.K., England, R., Manson G.A. & Willett, P. (1991) "Network design for the implementation of text searching using a multicomputer".  Information Processing and Management, 27, 265-283.

Willett, P. (1991) Three-Dimensional Chemical Structure Handling.  Taunton: Research Studies Press.  255 pages.

Willett, P. & Rasmussen, E.M. (1990) Parallel Database Processing.  London: Pitman.  173 pages.

El-Hamdouchi, A. & Willett, P. (1989) "Comparison of hierarchic agglomerative clustering methods for document retrieval."  Computer Journal, 32, 220-227

Brint, A.T. & Willett, P. (1987) "Algorithms for the identification of three-dimensional maximal common substructures." Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, 27, 152-158

Willett, P. (1987) Similarity and Clustering in Chemical Information Systems.  Letchworth: Research Studies Press.  254 pages.

Jakes, S.E. & Willett, P. (1986) "Pharmacophoric pattern matching in files of 3-D chemical structures: selection of inter-atomic distance screens."  Journal of Molecular Graphics, 4, 12-20. 

Willett, P. & Winterman, V. (1986) "A comparison of some measures of inter-molecular structural similarity."  Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships, 5, 18-25. 

Willett, P., Winterman, V. & Bawden, D. (1986) "Implementation of non-hierarchic cluster analysis methods in chemical information systems: selection of compounds for biological testing and clustering of substructure search output."  Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, 26, 109-118.

Griffiths, A., Robinson, L.A. & Willett, P. (1984) "Hierarchic agglomerative clustering methods for automatic document classification."  Journal of Documentation, 40, 175-205.

Willett, P. (1981) "A fast procedure for the calculation of similarity coefficients in automatic classification."  Information Processing and Management, 17, 53-60

Lynch, M.F. & Willett, P. (1978) "The automatic detection of chemical reaction sites."  Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, 18, 154-159.

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