Elicit | The AI Research Assistant for Literature Reviews

The world of academic research is built on the foundation of the literature review. It’s a critical, yet often grueling, process of sifting through mountains of papers, identifying relevant studies, and synthesizing findings. For decades, this has been a manual, time-consuming task that drains a researcher’s most valuable resources: time and energy. What if you could automate the most tedious parts of this process, allowing you to focus on critical thinking and analysis? Enter Elicit, a groundbreaking AI Research Assistant designed specifically to streamline and supercharge your literature review. Elicit isn’t just another academic search engine; it’s an intelligent partner that understands your research questions, finds relevant papers even without perfect keyword matches, and organizes key information into a structured, actionable format. This article will provide an in-depth look at Elicit, covering its powerful features, transparent pricing, and how it stands out in the growing landscape of research tools.

Core Features: How Elicit Automates and Enhances Your Research

Elicit’s power lies in its suite of interconnected features that create a seamless research automation workflow. It moves beyond simple keyword searches to offer a more conceptual and context-aware approach to discovering and analyzing academic literature.

The Literature Review Workflow

This is Elicit’s flagship feature. Instead of you searching for papers, Elicit finds them for you based on a natural language research question. It searches a vast database of over 200 million academic papers and identifies the most relevant ones. But it doesn’t stop there. Elicit reads these papers and presents you with a dynamic table summarizing their key findings. The “Abstract Summary” column provides a concise, AI-generated summary of each paper’s abstract tailored specifically to your question, saving you from reading dozens of irrelevant abstracts. This core function transforms the initial discovery phase from a multi-hour chore into a matter of minutes.

Extract Data from PDFs

One of the most powerful forms of research automation Elicit offers is its ability to extract specific data from your own collection of papers. You can upload a library of PDFs directly to the platform. Once uploaded, you can ask Elicit to find specific information within those documents and display it in a structured table. For example, you could ask it to extract the “sample size,” “intervention used,” or “key outcome measures” from 100 different papers. This feature is invaluable for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, turning unstructured text into organized, comparable data without manual data entry.

Advanced Paper Summarizer and Conceptual Search

Elicit functions as a highly sophisticated paper summarizer. Beyond the initial abstract summaries, you can ask follow-up questions and have Elicit synthesize takeaways from the top papers. This helps you quickly grasp the consensus, identify gaps in the literature, and brainstorm new research directions. Its academic search capabilities are also top-tier, as it can find relevant papers even if they don’t use your exact keywords. It understands the underlying concepts, helping you uncover studies you might have otherwise missed, thereby reducing selection bias and broadening the scope of your review.

Elicit Pricing: A Plan for Every Researcher

Elicit adopts a transparent and accessible pricing model built around a credit system, ensuring that researchers at all levels—from students to tenured professors—can benefit from its capabilities.

• Elicit Basic (Free Plan): To get you started, Elicit offers a generous free plan. New users receive a one-time grant of 10,000 credits. Credits are used to power the various workflows; for example, a literature review search might cost 200 credits, while summarizing a paper costs around 20. These 10,000 credits are more than enough to conduct several comprehensive literature searches, analyze dozens of papers, and fully evaluate whether the tool fits your needs. This plan is perfect for students, independent researchers, or anyone wanting to explore the power of an AI Research Assistant without any financial commitment.

• Elicit Plus ($12/month): For power users and professional researchers who have integrated Elicit into their daily workflow, the Elicit Plus plan is the ideal choice. Priced at $12 per month (or a discounted $120 annually), this plan provides you with 12,000 credits every month. This recurring credit allowance supports ongoing, large-scale research projects. Subscribers also benefit from priority customer support and early access to new features as they are developed. This plan ensures you always have the necessary resources for deep, continuous research automation.

• Elicit for Institutions: Elicit also provides custom plans for research teams, labs, and entire universities. These enterprise-level solutions offer centralized billing, team management features, and potentially larger credit pools to support collaborative research efforts. Institutions interested in deploying Elicit at scale can contact their sales team for a custom quote.

Elicit vs. Traditional Methods & Other AI Tools

To truly appreciate Elicit’s value, it’s helpful to compare it not only to traditional research methods but also to other AI tools in the academic space. Elicit carves out a unique niche by focusing on the end-to-end literature review workflow.

While tools like Google Scholar and PubMed are essential for academic search, they are fundamentally libraries. They provide a list of potential sources based on keywords, leaving the heavy lifting of vetting, reading, and synthesizing to you. Elicit, in contrast, acts as an analyst. It doesn’t just give you a list; it reads the papers for you and presents a synthesized summary of their findings in a structured format, directly answering your research question.

Here’s how Elicit compares to other popular AI research tools:

As the table shows, while other tools excel in specific areas like citation analysis or visual discovery, Elicit stands out as the most comprehensive AI Research Assistant for researchers who need to conduct a thorough literature review and extract structured data efficiently.

Getting Started with Elicit: A Quick Guide

Elicit is designed to be intuitive, but understanding its core workflow can help you get the most out of the platform from day one. Here’s a simple step-by-step guide:

1. Sign Up and Formulate Your Question: Head to elicit.org and sign up for a free account to receive your initial 10,000 credits. The most critical step is formulating a clear and specific research question. Instead of generic keywords, pose a question as you would in your research.

   # Good Example:
   What are the effects of mindfulness-based interventions on anxiety in university students?
   
   # Vague Example:
   mindfulness anxiety
   

2. Run the Literature Review Workflow: Enter your question into the “Literature Review” workflow. Elicit will then search for relevant papers and generate a table. The default columns will include the paper title, authors, journal, and an “Abstract Summary” tailored to your question.

3. Customize and Dig Deeper: This is where the magic happens. You can add custom columns to the table to extract specific information. Click “Add Column” and ask Elicit to find details like “Intervention,” “Duration of Study,” “Participant Demographics,” or “Funding Source.” Elicit will read the papers and populate these new columns with the requested data.

4. Analyze, Synthesize, and Export: With all your data neatly organized, you can sort and filter the table to identify patterns, gaps, and key themes. Once you have curated your list of relevant papers and extracted data, you can export the entire table as a CSV file for further analysis in Excel or other software, or as a BibTeX file to import directly into your reference manager like Zotero or Mendeley.

Is Elicit the Right AI Research Assistant for You?

If you are a student, academic, or professional researcher who spends a significant amount of time on literature reviews, the answer is a resounding yes. Elicit fundamentally changes the economics of research by automating low-level cognitive tasks, freeing you to focus on higher-level thinking, analysis, and generating novel insights. It minimizes the risk of missing crucial papers, reduces the tedious work of manual data extraction, and provides a structured overview of a research field in a fraction of the time it would traditionally take. By combining a powerful academic search engine with an intelligent paper summarizer and data extractor, Elicit solidifies its place as the leading AI Research Assistant for the modern researcher.

Ready to revolutionize your research process? Visit elicit.org today to claim your free credits and experience the future of literature reviews.