Elicit is an AI research assistant used by over 2 million researchers. It searches 125 million academic papers, summarises findings, and extracts structured data from studies into comparison tables — automating the most time-consuming parts of systematic literature reviews. Free tier. Plus: $12/month.
Elicit is an AI research assistant built specifically for academic and evidence-based research. You ask a research question in plain English, and Elicit searches 125 million academic papers using semantic understanding — finding papers that are conceptually relevant even when they do not contain your exact keywords. It then summarises each paper's findings, methodology and limitations, and lets you extract specific data points across all papers into a structured comparison table.
This is what makes Elicit genuinely different from Google Scholar. Scholar finds papers matching keywords. Elicit understands research questions and finds papers that address them, even when terminology differs across studies. For a systematic review or literature review, this difference is significant — you find papers you would otherwise miss.
The data extraction feature is Elicit's most powerful capability for systematic reviewers. Define the columns you need — sample size, population, intervention, outcome, effect size — and Elicit extracts this information from each paper and populates a table. A task that takes researchers hours of manual reading and data entry can be done in minutes.
Graduate students and academics conducting literature reviews and systematic reviews. Evidence synthesis professionals in healthcare, public health and policy. Industry researchers in life sciences, technology and social sciences who need to stay current with academic literature. Anyone doing formal research who needs to survey a field systematically rather than read selectively.
Elicit is a discovery and extraction tool. It finds papers and extracts data from them. For synthesising what you have found, upload papers to NotebookLM. For quick evidence-backed question answering, use Consensus.
Go to elicit.com and sign up free. You receive 5,000 one-time credits — enough for a substantial research project. Enter your research question in the search bar. Elicit returns the most relevant papers in a table. For each paper you can view: abstract, methodology summary, key findings, limitations. Click any paper to expand it and ask follow-up questions about its contents.
Use semantic search, not keywords. Elicit's strength is understanding research questions. Enter a full question — "Does mindfulness meditation reduce anxiety in adults with generalised anxiety disorder?" — not just keywords like "mindfulness anxiety". The fuller question produces better results.
Verify AI-extracted data. Elicit's data extraction is fast and usually accurate, but always verify extracted values against the original paper for any figure you will cite. Particularly check: sample sizes, effect sizes, and statistical significance values.
Elicit is built by Ought, a nonprofit research organisation. Per Elicit's official website, the tool searches 125 million papers from Semantic Scholar and other academic sources, using semantic similarity matching based on large language models to find relevant papers beyond keyword matching. The tool is used by over 2 million researchers.