Elicit
Automating literature reviews by extracting answers from many papers at once
- Best for
- Automating literature reviews by extracting answers from many papers at once
- Pricing
- Freemium
- Free plan
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web
- Category
- Research
What is Elicit?
Elicit is an AI research assistant that automates parts of a literature review: ask it a research question and it searches millions of papers, extracts relevant findings, and organizes them into a comparison table. It is built for the systematic-review style of research common in the sciences and social sciences.
How students can use it
- Building a comparison table of findings across 20+ studies for a dissertation literature review
- Quickly checking whether existing research already answers a hypothesis before designing a new study
- Extracting sample sizes and methods from a set of papers for a methods class assignment
Key features
- Ask a research question and get answers extracted from hundreds of papers
- Structured data extraction into a comparison table
- Semantic search across a database of over 125 million papers
- Custom columns to pull specific details (methodology, sample size, etc.) from each paper
- Chat-based interface for follow-up questions
Pros and cons
Pros
- Dramatically speeds up systematic literature reviews
- Extracts specific data points instead of just returning links
- Good at surfacing papers you would not have found by keyword search
- Table format makes comparing many studies at a glance easy
Cons
- Free tier credits run out quickly for large reviews
- Extracted data still needs to be verified against the source paper
- Best suited to empirical/scientific papers rather than theoretical or humanities work
- Can be overwhelming for a first-year student unfamiliar with systematic review methodology
Is Elicit free?
Yes — there is a free plan you can use without paying.
Elicit's free plan includes a limited monthly credit allowance for its core systematic-review workflow, letting you search and extract data from a smaller number of papers each month before needing Elicit Plus.
How to use it well
Use Elicit to find candidate papers, then read the actual PDF before citing any extracted claim
Narrow your research question as much as possible before running a search
Combine with Zotero to manage the papers Elicit surfaces
Limitations to know about
Extracted answers can be wrong or incomplete and must be checked against the original text
Free plan credits are limited, restricting how many papers you can process per month
Works best on papers with clear structured findings, weaker on qualitative research
Alternatives to Elicit
A Google research assistant that answers questions using only the sources you upload.
An AI search engine that answers questions and cites the sources it used.
Finding and understanding academic papers quickly
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