Review of Elicit
Elicit is an AI research assistant that searches academic papers, extracts key findings, and helps you build literature reviews. It uses language models to find relevant papers even when your search terms don't match exactly. Founded in 2022, it's used by 100,000+ researchers.
It finds relevant papers even with vague queries. Ask 'What are the effects of meditation on anxiety?' and Elicit returns relevant papers even if those exact words aren't in the abstract. Semantic search at its best.
200M+ papers indexed. Covers PubMed, Semantic Scholar, and major preprint servers. You're not missing important work.
Data extraction is the killer feature. Elicit can extract specific data points (sample size, methodology, findings) from hundreds of papers into a spreadsheet. What used to take weeks now takes hours.
Citation export is clean. Export to BibTeX, RIS, or CSV. Works with Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote.
It's not free. The free tier gives 5,000 credits. A real literature review burns through that in 2-3 hours. The Plus plan is $10/month for 50,000 credits.
Quality varies by field. Elicit is best for biomed, psychology, and social sciences. It's weaker in engineering, computer science, and humanities.
Full-text access is limited. Elicit reads abstracts, not full papers. For deep analysis, you still need to read the PDFs yourself.
Not a replacement for systematic reviews. Elicit is great for scoping and exploration, but for PRISMA-compliant systematic reviews, you still need Covidence or Rayyan.
Free: 5,000 credits. Plus: $10/month for 50,000 credits. Enterprise: custom with unlimited and team features.
Academic researchers, grad students, R&D teams. Anyone doing serious literature reviews.
★ 4.5/5. The best AI tool for academic research. Worth $10/month for any serious researcher.
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