Today marks the formal release of Search Workbench. A natural extension of the work in Visualizing PubMed, Search Workbench allows you to examine, edit and visualize your PubMed searches from a single interface.

Each search you enter is displayed as both a Venn diagram of its constituent parts as well as a line graph showing how the proportions of your results change over time. More importantly, you can also directly compare completed searches to one another — facilitating the process of fine-tuning a search strategy.

Search Workbench allows for hand-editing the Automatic Term Mapping translation of a search and the application of one of several pre-defined hedges. It also supports the saving of individual search sessions and the sharing of those sessions as text files.

I hope this will be a useful tool for searchers – please contact me at esperr@uga.edu with any critiques or enhancement requests.