Martin Westgate
I am a postdoctoral fellow in landscape ecology and conservation biology at the Australian National University in Canberra. I am interested in how we can realise the enormous potential benefits of systematic review given the difficulties induced by information oversupply. Specifically, I’m interested in text mining as a shortcut or a support tool for article screening. I’m also curious about the semantics of scientific terms, and whether we can adequately map them for improved information retrieval (i.e. thesauri, ontologies etc.).
More practically, I’ve written a couple of papers related to systematic review methodology, both published in Conservation Biology. I’m currently investigating ways to ‘clean’ scientific texts for improved inference from text mining - including semi-automated identification of species names, and distinguishing between methodological and theoretical context of full text articles. I’m also interested in the potential for text mining visualisations to support the processing of article abstracts during systematic review. At the moment, I run all of my analysis and software development in the R statistical environment.
My interest in this group is as a sounding board for ideas about potential research directions, a source of collaborators for publishing interesting research, and to let me know when I make glaring errors!
More practically, I’ve written a couple of papers related to systematic review methodology, both published in Conservation Biology. I’m currently investigating ways to ‘clean’ scientific texts for improved inference from text mining - including semi-automated identification of species names, and distinguishing between methodological and theoretical context of full text articles. I’m also interested in the potential for text mining visualisations to support the processing of article abstracts during systematic review. At the moment, I run all of my analysis and software development in the R statistical environment.
My interest in this group is as a sounding board for ideas about potential research directions, a source of collaborators for publishing interesting research, and to let me know when I make glaring errors!
Publications and Links
MJ Westgate & DB Lindenmayer (2017) The difficulties of systematic reviews. Conservation Biology in press.
MJ Westgate, PS Barton, JC Pierson & DB Lindenmayer (2015) Text analysis tools for identification of emerging topics and research gaps in conservation science. Conservation Biology, 29(6): 1606-1614.
MJ Westgate, PS Barton, JC Pierson & DB Lindenmayer (2015) Text analysis tools for identification of emerging topics and research gaps in conservation science. Conservation Biology, 29(6): 1606-1614.