Objectives: Search Workbench is designed to facilitate the process of developing complex PubMed searches by allowing the user to examine, edit and visualize searches from a single interface. Importantly, the system not only displays multiple visualizations on one screen, it also allows for direct comparisons of completed searches to one another, speeding the process of fine-tuning a search strategy. Methods: The NCBI API (E-utilities) is used to directly query PubMed, and search results are retrieved, parsed and visualized inside a web browser using JavaScript/jQuery. Each search is simultaneously visualized in two ways: as a Venn diagram of constituent terms using venn.js and as a line chart of yearly proportions of results using Google Charts. The interface allows for hand-editing the Automatic Term Mapping translation of a search and the application of one of several pre-defined hedges. Past searches within a session are itemized and can be selected for comparison to one another. In addition, individual search sessions can be saved and later shared as text files.

Audio (and video of slides) from a talk presented at the 118th Annual Meeting and Exhibition of the Medical Library Association in Atlanta, Georgia on May 21st, 2018