Professor Robert West
Robert West is Professor of Health Psychology and Director of Tobacco Studies at the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Research Centre, University College London, UK. Professor West is also co-director of the National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Addiction. He is co-author of the English National Smoking Cessation Guidelines that provided the blueprint for the UK-wide network of stop-smoking services that are now an established part of the UK National Health Service. His research includes evaluations of methods of helping smokers to stop and population surveys of smoking and smoking cessation patterns.
Workshop: Transforming Addiction Science through the Addiction Paper Authoring Tool and Addiction Ontology
The Addiction Paper Authoring Tool (PAT) has been developed to radically improve the quality of reporting of research studies in the field. It is an online tool that prompts authors for key information required and helps to produce text that is clear, coherent and consistent. Apart from enhancing the reporting of studies, it creates a database record of the information provided that will dramatically improve the quality and speed of evidence synthesis, allowing any feature of the study to be readily searched. The Addiction Ontology (AddictO) is a knowledge base that lies behind the tool allowing it to generate intelligent prompts based on information already provided. It will provide a comprehensive set of addiction-related terms and their definitions, allowing for more consistent use of terms and greater interoperability within the field and with other fields. The vision is that ultimately it will provide an ever expanding searchable database of knowledge in the field. This workshop will provide demonstrations of these projects and allow attendees to try them out and get involved in the programme going forward.