Elicit is an AI research assistant that searches over 138 million academic papers and 545,000 clinical trials, then generates structured research reports with sentence-level citations. Systematic literature reviewers report up to 80% time savings on screening and data extraction. Plus is $12/month, Pro is $49/month, with a real Free tier.
Elicit is an AI research assistant that searches over 138 million academic papers and 545,000 clinical trials, then generates structured research reports with sentence-level citations. Systematic literature reviewers report up to 80% time savings on screening and data extraction. Plus is $12/month, Pro is $49/month, with a real Free tier.
Elicit (elicit.org, made by Elicit Research, formerly part of Ought) is an AI-powered research platform aimed squarely at scientific researchers, systematic reviewers, and evidence-based practitioners. It replaces the classic 'open Google Scholar, download 200 PDFs, copy findings into a spreadsheet' workflow with a semantic search over 138 million academic papers and 545,000 clinical trials, a report generation feature that drafts structured research briefs with sentence-level citations, and a systematic literature review workspace that automates screening and data extraction. The product is used by more than 5 million researchers, including at named institutions the site highlights on its customer wall. The workflow: type a research question in natural language, Elicit runs a semantic search (so you don't need to guess keywords), returns ranked papers with per-paper summaries, and can then generate a report grounded in that set — customizable at the level of which papers are included and what fields are extracted from each. For systematic reviews specifically, Elicit's team pitches up to 80% time savings on the screening and extraction stages, which historically consume months of postdoc time. Pricing is credit-metered on top of tiers: Basic (Free) covers semantic search over the full corpus and limited monthly credits; Plus at $12/month adds a higher credit allowance, full systematic-review workflows, structured extraction tables across hundreds of papers, notebooks, and priority processing; Pro at $49/month significantly expands credits, adds advanced extraction columns/custom fields, and higher-volume systematic-review support; Team/Enterprise is custom, adding shared workspaces, SSO, institutional billing, admin analytics, and dedicated support. The Library and Alerts features let researchers store sources across projects and receive notifications when new papers matching an ongoing question appear. What differentiates Elicit from generic LLM chat tools is the fidelity commitment: every claim in an Elicit-generated brief is tied back to a sentence in a source, with rich tables and multi-step workflows that go beyond the linear chat UI. It's also validated for accuracy — the site links to their own methodology for measuring hallucination rate against expert reviewers, which is unusual candor for the space. Trade-offs vs alternatives: Consensus is a lighter-weight competitor targeting the same evidence-synthesis niche; Scite focuses more on citation-context analysis than report generation; and general research assistants inside Perplexity or ChatGPT don't offer Elicit's systematic-review workspace or the 138M-paper corpus. Elicit is the right pick when the output needs to survive peer review, when systematic-review methodology matters, or when a research team wants to compress a multi-week screening pass into an afternoon.
Elicit is the most sophisticated AI research assistant for academic literature, going beyond keyword search to understand research concepts and extract structured data from papers. The systematic review automation is particularly valuable for researchers conducting meta-analyses. Limited to academic/scientific literature, but within that domain, the depth of analysis is unmatched.
Elicit indexes over 125 million academic papers via Semantic Scholar and uses concept-aware semantic search rather than keyword matching. Researchers can ask natural-language research questions and surface relevant papers even when terminology differs across studies, dramatically improving recall on novel or interdisciplinary topics.
Elicit can extract standardized fields like sample size, methodology, intervention, outcomes, and effect sizes from hundreds of papers into a single structured table. The extraction model is trained on academic paper structure and reportedly achieves 85-95% accuracy on well-defined fields, accelerating meta-analysis prep by 5-10x.
The 2026-introduced Notebooks feature lets researchers organize multiple searches, saved papers, and extractions into a single workspace, then generate AI-drafted literature review synthesis across the collected evidence. This bridges the gap between paper discovery and writing the actual review.
Elicit's screening and extraction workflows align with PRISMA, Cochrane, and other institutional systematic review standards. The platform guides researchers through dual screening, inclusion/exclusion documentation, and quality assessment in a way that maps cleanly to journal-required reporting.
Elicit integrates with Zotero and Mendeley and supports RIS, BibTeX, and CSV exports for downstream use in writing tools and statistical software. This means extracted data tables and citation lists drop directly into existing academic workflows without manual reformatting.
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$12/month
$49/month
Custom
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We believe in transparent reviews. Here's what Elicit doesn't handle well:
Elicit launched Notebooks in 2026, a workspace feature that lets researchers organize multiple search queries, saved papers, and extraction tables into a single project and generate AI-drafted literature review syntheses across the collected evidence. The platform also continues to expand its 125M+ paper index and refine extraction accuracy on qualitative and non-RCT study designs.
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Pricing and features change often. If anything on this Elicit page is wrong or missing, tell us and include a link to the source. We review every correction.