Background: Your search results represent more than just days or weeks of hard work - they are also data, locked in a range of formats and difficult to analyze, re-purpose or transform.

Objectives: This presentation demonstrates a collection of software tools that allow access to this data, as well as couple of example applications.

Results: The first sample application is a tool for comparing the keywords in a set of references, generating Venn diagrams of the keywords in common to the citations. When developing search strategies for systematic review we often begin with two or more references that exemplify what we hope to include in our review. This software allows the systematic examination of the keywords used in a set of references. This process will hopefully make the decisions of which keywords to use in a search strategy more transparent. Also, if the development of the search strategy does not have the benefit of subject matter expertise, a data-driven approach can aid the search strategy developer to produce a result that is improved by the examination of latent data in a corpus of references. The second sample application is a tool for exporting a set of references to a spreadsheet. More than once I wished for a way to send references to colleagues without bibliography-management software - but they did have access to a spreadsheet program and furthermore they knew how to use it. Also, by transforming search results into a spreadsheet format they are vastly easier to import into statistical software for analysis.

Conclusions: This presentation will discuss these and other potential applications, the tools needed to build them, and the source code of all the tools discussed.