Search History and Details gives us some interesting tools to manipulate and combine existing searches. This section can be accessed below the Advanced Search Builder. It is only good for the current session unless your searches are saved in your My NCBI Account (More about My NCBI).
1. Search # - each search you complete is numbered. This enables us to combine searches and create very complex and elaborate search strategies - instead of having concepts in each line, you have entire search strings. For example: (#1) AND (#5)
2. Actions - clicking the actions ellipsis ( … ) will allow you to ADD the selected query back into the query box; you can combine or edit searches in this manner. You can also select to DELETE searches from the history or CREATE ALERTS
3. Details - clicking the details > shows us what is actually going on behind the scenes. As I said earlier PubMed has some advanced term matching happening. This is where we can see that term matching in action. This can be very helpful if you are getting unexpected results.
Under the search, we can see the expanded query - what's actually being searched. further is the translations; here PubMed breaks out each term and details the breakdowns. This expanded query can be very long if you have a complex search such as #5.
4. Search - here we can see the search as we entered it.
5. Results - clicking the results number hyperlink will run the search again; and the time stamp shows us when the search last ran.
Above the queries, we have the option to DOWNLOAD the history or click DELETE and remove the entire search details.
