Information School News

The triennial conference on Chemoinformatics was held at the University of Sheffield Edge building earlier this month, organised by our own Professors Val Gillet and Peter Willett and Dr Antonio de la Vega de Leon. A new prize has been established at the conference: The Peter Willett Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation, established by the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group. The establishment of the prize is in recognition of Peter's outstanding contributions to the field, for which he was warmly congratulated. The Chemoinformatics research group at the conference The first winner of the prize is PhD student James Webster for his poster entitled 'Reaction Vector Based Monte Carlo Tree Search for De Novo Design'. James Webster with his poster and award In addition, PhD students Christina Founti, Giammy Ghiandoni and Jess Stacey were all given honourable mentions for their posters. The posters were judged by...

Professor Val Gillet and six other members of the Chemoinformatics Research Group are attending the 11th International Conference on Chemical Structures in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, May 27-31st 2018. This is the major international conference in the field, with over 200 delegates from more than 20 countries. As usual, the Sheffield Chemoinformatics Group is making a strong contribution to the meeting with one oral presentation (Matt Seddon) and three posters (Antonio de le Vega de Leon, Christina Founti and Gian Marco Ghiandoni). Professor Gillet is on the Scientific Advisory Board and is a member of the Poster Jury. The final session of the meeting on Chemoinformatics is dedicated to Prof. Peter Willett to celebrate his outstanding contribution to the field over 40 years. Val will chair this session and will open it by presenting some highlights of Peter’s career.

We are delighted to say that Professor Peter Willett has been awarded honorary membership of the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society (MGMS), an international society for the application of computer techniques for the discovery of novel drugs. Honorary membership is bestowed on people who have made an excellent and lasting contribution to the MGMS's area of science, with Peter's award reflecting his significant contributions to the development of chemoinformatics over the last forty years. There are 8 current honorary members ,one of whom, Martin Karplus, is a Nobel Prize winner!

The latest edition of the Aslib Journal of Information Management is a special issue honouring Mark Hepworth, Emeritus Professor at Loughborough University and an alumnus of the Sheffield Information School, who died on 21 December 2016. For many years he pushed forward the boundaries in studies of people's information behaviour and experience. To honour Mark's contribution to library and information science, his friends, colleagues and students contributed articles to the issue, reflecting topics that characterised his career: health information, development studies and information behaviour. Mark studied an MSc in Information Studies at the Information School before moving into a career that took him from industry into academia. He worked at Datasolve Limited in customer support care before becoming Business Development Manager for the Pearson/Financial Times group. He was appointed Senior Lecturer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 1993 where he helped t...

On Tuesday 28 October 2014, Professor Peter Willett of the Information School will be delivering a seminar on why authors cite material and how readers interpret those citations. Citation context analysis is an area of bibliometrics that is based on the assumption that the readers of an article will understand why the original author cited a particular item.  This is only an assumption, and one that has never been tested in any detail.  The project to be described here involved the authors of ten library and information science articles providing the reasons for citing material in their articles.  These reasons were then compared with the reasons suggested independently by readers of those articles. The results that were obtained suggest that readers are able to correctly perceive the authors’ reasons for citation only to a very limited extent.  As a result this questions the appropriateness of citation context analysis as a way of analysing the ac...

Dr Dalibor Fiala is visiting the Information School between 29 July and  1st August to work with Professor Peter Willett on a citation study of computer science  in Eastern Europe since 1989. Dalibor is is an associate professor at the Department of Computer  Science and Engineering at the University of West Bohemia, and has  interests in a range of informetrics topics.

Research published by staff and students from the Information School can be accessed for free via the University’s open access repository, White Rose Research Online . HEFCE have just published a ‘Policy for Open Access in the Post-2014 Research Excellence Framework’ which calls for all research outputs to be made publically available through a repository.  The Information School has been committed to the principal of open access for some years, and in December 2013 almost 15% of the University’s content in White Rose Research Online was provided by the Information School.  At present, an ongoing project within the School is working to further expand the volume of research content which is available online through open access.  This has already dramatically increased the volume of the School’s research which is available online. Some recent additions of new publications include: Smith, J., Hall, M.M., Goodale, P., Clough, P. and...

The Information School’s Chemoinformatics Research Group has released a paper which will help the European Medicines Agency to decide whether new orphan drugs should be granted licences.   Evaluation and supervision of medicines throughout the European Union is the responsibility of the European Medicines Agency.   One particular activity which the Agency is involved in is the licensing of orphan drugs – medicines which are designed to treat people with rare diseases.   This activity is currently carried out by a panel of human experts.   However the Chemoinformatics Research Group’s paper outlines computer techniques that could be used to help the panel in deciding whether or not a new orphan drug should be granted a licence.   The paper (Franco, P., Porta, N., Holliday, J. D. & Willett, P. “The use of 2D fingerprint methods to support the assessment of structural similarity in orphan drug legislation” Journal of Cheminformatics , 6:5, 2014) ca...

The Sheffield conference on Chemoinformatics ( cisrg.shef.ac.uk/shef2013 ) is being held at The Edge and is being run by Val Gillet, John Holliday and Peter Willett on behalf of the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society and the Chemical Structure Association Trust.  The conference has brought together over 140 delegates from industry and academia from across the globe to discuss the latest techniques in computer-aided drug discovery.  With over 75 oral and poster presentations and an exhibition from leading software companies, it has been a very busy but enjoyable three days.

The Call for papers has recently appeared for the 6th Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics .  This major international meeting, which is again being co-sponsored by the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society and by  the Chemical Structure Association Trust, will be held at The Edge, University of Sheffield, 22nd-24th July 2013.

Peter Willett attended the Internet Librarian International 2012 conference in Olympia, where he received the Jason Farradane Award on behalf of the School's Chemoinformatics Research Group (Val Gillet, John Holliday and Peter Willett). Next week he will be visiting the USA to give talks on "Introduction to chemoinformatics" at Fordham University and "Fusing database rankings in similarity-based virtual screening" at Rutgers University.

The Information School's Chemoinformatics Research Group has been awarded the 2012 UKeiG Jason Farradane Award , in recognition of its outstanding 40 year contribution to the information field. The prize is awarded to the three current members of the group,  Professor Val Gillet , Dr John Holliday and Professor Peter Willett . The judges recognised the Group's status as one of the world's leading centres of chemoinformatics research, a major contributor to the field of information science, and an exemplar in raising the profile of the information profession. The School has a long association with the Farradane prize. Its second recipient was long time member of staff Professor Mike Lynch in 1980.