Elicit

Elicit: Your AI-Powered Research Assistant

Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of academic literature? Say goodbye to endless hours of manual searching and tedious summarizing. Meet Elicit, an innovative AI research assistant designed to automate and accelerate your research workflows. Developed by the non-profit research lab Ought, Elicit leverages advanced language models to help students, academics, and professionals find relevant papers, extract key data, and synthesize findings with unprecedented efficiency. It’s not just a search engine; it’s your partner in discovery.

Core Capabilities: A Text-Focused Powerhouse

It’s important to understand where Elicit excels. This tool is a specialist, focusing entirely on text-based analysis of academic and research papers. Its core strength lies in understanding, processing, and synthesizing complex information from published studies. Elicit does not have capabilities for image generation, video creation, or audio processing. Instead, it channels all its power into revolutionizing how you interact with scholarly literature.

Key Features that Supercharge Your Research

Elicit is packed with features designed to streamline every step of the research process. Here’s where it truly shines:

• Literature Review Workflow: This is the flagship feature. Simply ask a research question in natural language, and Elicit will find relevant papers from its massive database. More importantly, it generates a summary of findings from the top papers, giving you a high-level overview in minutes, not days.
• Extract Data into a Table: A game-changer for meta-analyses and systematic reviews. You can ask Elicit to pull specific information—like sample size, interventions, outcomes, or methodology—from a set of papers and organize it neatly into a structured, exportable table.
• Semantic Search: Move beyond simple keyword matching. Elicit understands the concept behind your query, allowing it to find relevant papers even if they don’t use your exact terminology.
• Brainstorm Research Questions: Feeling stuck? Elicit can help you explore new research directions and formulate compelling questions based on a given topic or paper.
• Paper Summarization: Upload a PDF or provide a link, and Elicit can provide a concise, abstractive summary, helping you quickly decide if a paper is worth a full read.

Elicit Pricing: Plans for Every Researcher

Elicit offers a flexible pricing structure to accommodate different levels of usage, from casual exploration to intensive research projects.

Basic Plan (Free)

Perfect for getting started and handling smaller tasks. You receive a one-time grant of 5,000 credits upon signing up. This is a great way to test out all the core features without any commitment.

Plus Plan

For dedicated researchers who need more power. For $12 per month (or $120 annually), you get 12,000 credits every month. This plan ensures you have the resources for ongoing literature reviews and in-depth data extraction projects.

Institutional & Enterprise

Elicit also provides custom plans for research labs, universities, and organizations. These plans offer bulk credits, centralized billing, and team management features. You’ll need to contact their sales team for a custom quote.

Who is Elicit For? The Ideal User Profile

Elicit is built for anyone whose work relies on evidence-based research. Its primary audience includes:

• Graduate and PhD Students: Drastically cuts down the time spent on literature reviews, allowing more time for original research and analysis.
• Academic Researchers & Scientists: An indispensable tool for staying on top of new publications, conducting meta-analyses, and identifying gaps in existing literature.
• Medical Professionals: Enables quick synthesis of clinical trial data and medical studies to inform evidence-based practice.
• Policy Analysts & Think Tank Researchers: Helps to efficiently gather and analyze evidence from social science, economic, and public policy papers.
• Corporate R&D Professionals: Accelerates the process of reviewing technical papers, patents, and competitor research.

Elicit Alternatives: How Does It Stack Up?

While Elicit is a leader in its niche, it’s helpful to know the landscape. Here’s a quick comparison with other tools:

• Scite.ai: Scite also focuses on academic papers but places a strong emphasis on “Smart Citations,” showing you how a paper has been cited by others (i.e., if it has been supported or contradicted). Elicit, by contrast, is more focused on summarizing and extracting data based on your direct questions.
• Consensus: Similar to Elicit, Consensus is an AI search engine for finding insights in research papers. It’s excellent for getting quick, evidence-based answers to “yes/no” or “what is the effect of X on Y” type questions. Elicit’s workflow is generally more comprehensive for building a full literature review from the ground up.
• ChatGPT & General LLMs: While you can ask ChatGPT to summarize a paper, it lacks the specialized workflows of Elicit. It cannot perform a systematic search across a database of millions of papers or extract data into a structured table from multiple sources simultaneously. Elicit is the specialist; ChatGPT is the generalist.