Elicit

AI research assistant: Enter a research question to search over 125 million papers, automatically generate cited structured research reports, and support data extraction, systematic literature reviews, and library alerts.

AI Search Engine#Literature Review#Scientific Research#Academic Papers

Updated: 2026-10-26

What is Elicit?

Elicit is an AI assistant for scientific research, officially positioned as "enabling researchers to conduct evidence-based work ten times more efficiently." It integrates retrieval, summarization, data extraction and conversational reading into a single workflow: input a research question, and it can retrieve from more than 125 million papers and automatically generate structured research reports with citations. The official website states that it has been used by more than 5 million researchers across academia and industry, and describes the product as "standing on the shoulders of giants"—to quickly understand the boundaries of what is scientifically known and thus discover the unknown.

Who is it for?

Graduate students and researchers who need to conduct literature reviews and quickly grasp the current situation of a certain field; clinical and policy researchers who need to track updates of evidence; as well as industry analysts who have to read a large amount of background information within a limited time. The customer stories displayed on the official website cover multiple industries, and are applicable to both academic institutions and internal corporate research teams. They are especially suitable for scenarios where "research questions are clear but the volume of literature is large".

Key features

Research Agent

After inputting a research question, it automatically retrieves millions of papers and generates a structured research report with citations within seconds, directly providing an overview of the evidence for that question and condensing work that would normally take days down to minutes.

Paper Retrieval and Dialogue

It covers more than 125 million papers, allows cross-literature questioning, and synthesizes answers from multiple papers around a topic instead of just providing a single abstract.

Data Extraction

Extract information from multiple papers based on the same dimension (such as sample size, intervention measures, main results), and automatically organize it into tables for horizontal comparison, greatly reducing manual entry and verification.

Systematic Literature Review

Provides specialized support for systematic review work that requires rigorous processes, helping to organize retrieval, screening, and evidence collation, and adapting to the methodological requirements of formal research projects.

Library & Alerts

Organize papers of interest in a unified library, subscribe to alerts for new papers, stay updated on field developments, and build a personal evidence repository.

Scale and Transparency

The official website emphasizes Scale (millions of papers), Accuracy and Transparency — all generated content comes with cited sources that can be traced and verified, making it more reliable than pure chat-based Q&A.

How to use Elicit

Ideal for the "Before Reading" stage: First, use research reports to determine which ones are worth reading closely, then extract data to organize comparable tables, and finally verify against the original text.
Save long-term tracking directions to the library and enable reminders to continuously build your own evidence base.
when collaborating with a team, reports and the library can also serve as a common research draft.

Things to know

Elicit emphasizes transparency and traceability, with all generated content accompanied by citations. However, citations still need to be opened and verified one by one—especially for data extraction results, the model may mix up the designs and populations of different studies, resulting in misleading tables.

It excels at "finding direction from a large volume of literature", but please return to the original text to confirm key conclusions, figures and controversial points, as AI summaries may lose details or context.

The free version usually has usage limits; for bulk extraction and long reports, it is recommended to evaluate paid tiers; for subscription alerts, pay attention to email frequency settings to avoid information overload.

When it comes to unpublished literature or content behind paywalls, the coverage of searches may be limited, and it cannot be guaranteed that all 125 million articles can be read in full.