Elicit

Elicit is an AI research assistant that helps researchers find, extract data from, and synthesize over 125 million academic papers. It uses large language models to automate literature reviews, generate structured reports with sentence-level citations, and identify relevant studies for meta-analyses and systematic reviews. Over 2 million researchers in academia and industry use Elicit to accelerate research that would traditionally take weeks of manual work.

Yes, Elicit has a generous free tier. The Basic plan (free) includes unlimited paper searches, summaries, and Chat with Papers. The Plus plan ($12/month or $120/year) adds 4 automated reports per month and advanced extraction. The Pro plan ($42/month) includes unlimited high-accuracy columns, 100 PDF extractions per month, and enhanced customization. Enterprise plans with institutional billing are available by contacting sales.

Elicit specializes in academic papers — it searches scholarly databases and extracts structured data from peer-reviewed research with sentence-level citations. Perplexity searches the general web and provides cited answers from any source. Use Elicit for systematic literature reviews and evidence synthesis. Use Perplexity for general research questions where you need web-wide coverage rather than academic depth.

Yes — this is Elicit's primary use case. It searches for relevant papers, extracts key findings into structured tables with customizable columns, identifies patterns across studies, generates automated reports of up to 80 papers, and helps synthesize results with sentence-level citations. Strict screening criteria added in December 2025 enable more rigorous paper filtering for systematic reviews.

Elicit searches over 125 million academic papers from Semantic Scholar's database. It covers most peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings across sciences, engineering, medicine, social sciences, and more. The tool focuses exclusively on academic and scientific literature rather than general web content, news articles, or grey literature.

Research Agents are automated workflows introduced in 2025-2026 that handle complex research tasks like competitive landscape analysis, broad topic exploration, and research landscape mapping. They run multi-step searches and synthesis autonomously, producing structured outputs with citations — reducing repetitive manual work for researchers handling large-scale literature analysis.

Yes. Elicit launched its API in March 2026, allowing developers and research teams to programmatically search papers and generate reports. This enables integration with custom research workflows, internal tools, and automated pipelines for organizations that need to process academic literature at scale.

Elicit provides sentence-level citations that link every AI-generated claim directly to the exact sentence in the source paper, making verification straightforward. The tool focuses on extracting and organizing existing research rather than generating new claims, which significantly reduces hallucination risk compared to general-purpose AI. However, researchers should always verify critical findings against original papers.

Both search academic papers, but they serve different workflows. Elicit is designed for deep literature review — extracting structured data into tables, generating multi-paper reports, and supporting systematic review workflows. Consensus is better for quick yes/no answers to research questions by measuring scientific agreement. Use Elicit when you need detailed data extraction; use Consensus for quick evidence checks.

No. Elicit dramatically accelerates the research process but does not replace human judgment. It automates the most time-consuming parts of literature review — finding papers, extracting data, and organizing findings — but researchers still need to interpret results, assess study quality, evaluate biases, and draw conclusions. Think of it as a research accelerator that saves weeks of manual labor, not a replacement for critical thinking.