Elicit: The AI Research Assistant for Literature Reviews and Academic Workflows

Introduction

Elicit is an AI-powered research assistant designed to automate and streamline parts of the academic research workflow, with a particular focus on conducting literature reviews. Developed by Ought (and now operating as an independent public benefit corporation), Elicit leverages large language models to help researchers, students, and academics find relevant papers, extract key information, synthesize findings, and identify concepts across a vast corpus of scholarly articles.

Unlike general search engines, Elicit is specifically built to understand research questions and interact with academic literature in a more nuanced way. It aims to make the research process more efficient and comprehensive by helping users quickly identify relevant studies, understand their key takeaways, and organize information for their own work.

Key Features

Elicit offers a range of features tailored to the needs of academic researchers:

• AI-Powered Paper Search: Finds relevant academic papers based on natural language research questions, going beyond simple keyword matching. It searches a database of over 125 million papers from sources like Semantic Scholar, PubMed, arXiv, and more.
• Literature Review Workflows:
  • Find Papers: Discovers relevant papers and presents them with summaries and key information in a customizable table.
  • Systematic Reviews (Pro/Team feature): A guided workflow to significantly accelerate large systematic reviews, including automated screening, data extraction from thousands of papers, and report generation.
  • Upload and Extract: Allows users to upload their own PDF documents and extract specific data points or summaries from them.
  • Summarize Concepts: Identifies and summarizes common concepts, themes, effects, or arguments discussed across a set of papers.
• Automated Summarization: Provides concise summaries of individual papers or groups of papers, often highlighting aspects relevant to the user's query.
• Data Extraction: Automatically extracts key information from papers, such as methodologies, interventions, outcomes, sample sizes, and other user-defined data points, into structured tables. This is particularly useful for meta-analyses and systematic reviews.
• Question Answering from Papers: Users can ask specific questions about the content of uploaded papers or papers found through search, and Elicit will attempt to answer based on the text.
• Filtering and Sorting: Results can be filtered by publication year, study type, keywords, and other criteria. Columns in the results table can often be customized to show specific extracted information.
• Identification of Themes and Concepts: Helps uncover overarching themes, arguments, or methodologies discussed across multiple papers.
• Citation and Source Tracking: Answers and extracted information are typically linked back to the source papers, allowing for verification.
• Export Options: Allows users to export search results, extracted data, and summaries in formats like CSV or BIB, facilitating integration with other research tools (e.g., Zotero import).
• Iterative Refinement: Researchers can quickly evaluate variations in research questions and screening/extraction criteria, seeing results in minutes.

Specific Use Cases

Elicit is designed to support various stages of the academic research process:

• Conducting Comprehensive Literature Reviews: Systematically find, screen, and extract information from a large number of relevant papers.
• Finding "Seed" Papers: Identify seminal or highly relevant papers to a research question, which can then be used for further exploration (e.g., citation mining).
• Summarizing Large Volumes of Research: Quickly get an overview of key findings from multiple papers without having to read each one in full initially.
• Identifying Research Gaps: By synthesizing existing literature, Elicit can help researchers spot areas that need further investigation.
• Brainstorming Research Questions: Explore existing literature around a topic to refine or develop new research questions.
• Extracting Data for Meta-Analyses or Systematic Reviews: Efficiently pull specific data points (e.g., sample sizes, effect sizes, methodologies) from numerous studies.
• Keeping Up-to-Date with New Research: Quickly screen and summarize new publications in a field of interest.
• Understanding Complex Topics: Break down complex research areas by identifying key concepts and how they are discussed across different papers.
• Supporting Evidence-Based Decision Making: Gather and synthesize evidence from academic literature to inform decisions.

Usage Guide

Using Elicit typically involves the following steps through its web interface (elicit.com):

1. Sign Up/Log In: Create an account or log in to access Elicit's features.
2. Choose a Workflow/Starting Point: On the Elicit homepage, you'll find several options to begin your research:
   • Find Papers: Enter a research question in natural language to search Elicit's extensive database of academic papers.
   • Start a Systematic Review (Pro/Team feature): A guided, step-by-step process for conducting systematic reviews, including paper gathering, screening, data extraction, and report generation.
   • Research Report: Automatically generate in-depth answers and reports based on your research question, extracting data from multiple papers.
   • Upload and Extract: Upload your own PDF files (or select from your library) to create a table and extract data or summaries from them.
   • Summarize Concepts: Identify common concepts discussed across the literature for a given topic.
3. Enter Your Research Question/Upload Papers:
   • If searching, formulate a clear and specific research question. Elicit may offer suggestions to refine it.
   • If uploading, select your PDF files or import from Zotero.
4. Review and Refine Results:
   • Elicit will display a list of papers, often in a table format, with summaries and extracted information relevant to your query.
   • Customize Columns: Add or remove columns in the table to display specific information extracted from the papers (e.g., "Main Findings," "Methodology," "Sample Population").
   • Filter and Sort: Use filters (e.g., publication year, keywords) to narrow down the results.
   • Inspect Papers: Click on paper titles to see more details, abstracts, and sometimes links to the full text.
5. Extract Further Information:
   • For selected papers, you can ask follow-up questions or request Elicit to extract additional specific data points.
6. Synthesize and Export:
   • Use Elicit's features to identify themes or common concepts across the selected literature.
   • Export your findings, tables, or lists of papers in formats like CSV or BIB for use in other software or for writing your manuscript.
7. Iterate: Research is often an iterative process. Refine your questions, add more papers, or adjust your extraction criteria as you learn more.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q1: What is Elicit? A1: Elicit is an AI research assistant designed to automate and streamline parts of academic research workflows, particularly literature reviews. It helps researchers find relevant papers, summarize key information, extract data, and synthesize findings from a large database of scholarly articles.

Q2: How is Elicit different from Google Scholar or PubMed? A2: While traditional academic search engines like Google Scholar or PubMed are excellent for finding papers based on keywords and metadata, Elicit uses language models to understand research questions in natural language, summarize papers in the context of those questions, and extract specific data points into comparable tables. It offers more advanced analytical and synthesis capabilities beyond simple search and retrieval.

Q3: What data sources does Elicit use? A3: Elicit primarily uses the Semantic Scholar academic graph, which includes over 125 million papers (and growing, with some sources mentioning up to 200 million) from various publishers and preprint archives like PubMed, arXiv, Cell, JAMA, and more. It focuses on publicly accessible and indexed academic literature.

Q4: How accurate are the summaries and extracted information from Elicit? A4: Elicit aims for high accuracy (sometimes citing over 90% for data extraction in specific contexts), but like all AI tools, it is not infallible. The accuracy can depend on the clarity of the papers, the specificity of the questions, and the complexity of the information being extracted. Elicit encourages users to verify AI-generated data and provides links back to the source material for this purpose.

Q5: Is Elicit free to use? What are the pricing plans? A5: Elicit offers a Basic (free) plan with features like unlimited search, limited paper summaries/chat at once, and limited data extraction per month. Paid plans typically include: * Plus Plan ($12/month): More papers for summaries/chat, more data extractions, export options. * Pro Plan ($49/month): Even more data extractions, ability to extract data from tables within papers, dedicated systematic review workflows. * Team Plan (~$79/month per user): Higher limits pooled across the team. * Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing. Always check the official Elicit website for the most current pricing and plan features.

Q6: What are the limitations of Elicit? A6: Limitations include: * Its primary focus is on academic, empirical literature; it may be less effective for purely theoretical or non-empirical domains, or non-academic data. * The quality of output can depend on the availability and accessibility of full-text papers. * AI can sometimes miss nuances or misinterpret complex information. Critical review by the researcher is essential. * The free plan has usage limits on certain features. * Currently, research and sources are predominantly in English.

Q7: Can Elicit replace a human researcher for literature reviews? A7: Elicit is designed to be a powerful assistant that can significantly speed up and augment the literature review process. However, it is not intended to be a complete replacement for human critical thinking, in-depth reading of key papers, and nuanced interpretation. It automates many tedious tasks, allowing researchers to focus on higher-level analysis and synthesis.

Q8: Does Elicit generate text like ChatGPT? A8: While Elicit uses large language models and can generate summaries and reports, its core strength lies in finding, structuring, and extracting information from existing academic papers with citations, rather than generating entirely new creative text in the same way a general-purpose chatbot might. Its generation is more grounded in the provided literature.

Related Links

• Elicit Official Website: https://elicit.com (previously elicit.org)
• Elicit Help Center/Support: https://support.elicit.com/
• Elicit Blog: Often linked from their main website, providing updates and use cases.
• Elicit Pricing: https://elicit.com/pricing (or a similar link on their website)
• Ought (Original Developer): https://ought.org/elicit (provides background on Elicit's mission)
• Semantic Scholar (Primary Data Source): https://www.semanticscholar.org/