Professor Peter Willett

Professor Peter Willett

MA (Oxford), MSc (Sheffield), PhD (Sheffield), DSc (Sheffield)
Professor of Information Science

Contact Details

Email address: p.willett@sheffield.ac.uk
Tel: 0114 2222633 (External) 22633 (Internal)
Fax: 0114 2780300
Room Location: Room 229, Second Floor, Regent Court

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), and of the American Chemical Society Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research (2005)
  • 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.

Teaching activities

Chemoinformatics, information retrieval, information society, research methods.

Key publications

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.

Willett, P. (1989) "Textual and chemical information processing using parallel computer hardware".  Journal of Information Science, 15, 223-236

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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