Elicit

What is Elicit?

Elicit is an AI-powered research assistant built specifically for academic and scientific literature. It searches a corpus of over 138 million papers, then automatically generates structured research reports backed by sentence-level citations. Unlike general-purpose AI chatbots that may hallucinate sources, Elicit grounds every claim in a retrievable paper — users can click through to the exact sentence that supports each finding.

The core workflow is built around a research question rather than a keyword search. Users type a question, Elicit retrieves the most relevant papers, and then lets researchers add extraction columns — pulling specific data points (sample sizes, outcomes, methods) from each paper into a structured table. The systematic review feature extends this to bulk screening, enabling teams to apply inclusion/exclusion criteria across thousands of papers in a fraction of the time a manual review would take. Elicit also offers research alerts that notify users when new papers matching a topic are published.

Who is it for?

Elicit is designed for people who need rigorous, evidence-based answers from the published scientific record — not just a quick summary from an AI chatbot. It is most valuable when the volume of relevant literature makes manual screening impractical.

• Academic researchers and PhD students conducting systematic or scoping reviews who need to screen hundreds or thousands of papers for inclusion criteria.
• Pharmaceutical and biotech analysts extracting structured data from clinical trials and preclinical studies across large paper sets.
• Policy researchers and government analysts who need to synthesise evidence from disparate scientific sources into citable briefings.
• Research teams at tech and consumer-goods companies tracking the scientific literature relevant to a product area, using alerts and the API to integrate findings into existing workflows.