In this paper we describe the X-TRACT workbench, which enables efficient termbased querying against a domain-specific literature corpus. Its main aim is to aid domain specialists in locating and extracting new knowledge from scientific literature corpora. Before querying, a corpus is automatically terminologically analysed by the ATRACT system, which performs terminology recognition based on the C/NCvalue method enhanced by incorporation of term variation handling. The results of terminology processing are annotated in XML, and the produced XML documents are stored in an XML-native database. All corpus retrieval operations are performed against this database using an XML query language. We illustrate the way in which the X-TRACT workbench can be utilised for knowledge discovery, literature mining and conceptual information extraction.