Elicit: AI-Powered Academic Research Assistant Guide
Streamline academic research with Elicit AI. Learn about paper search, data extraction, systematic review workflows, and pricing.
Best AI Tools 2026
February 22, 2026
Elicit is an AI research assistant designed specifically for academic and scientific research. While ChatGPT can hallucinate citations and make up papers that do not exist, Elicit searches real academic databases and returns actual papers with verified information. It reads papers for you, extracts specific data points, and helps you organize findings for literature reviews and systematic analysis. For researchers, graduate students, and anyone who needs to synthesize large volumes of academic literature, Elicit is a transformative tool.
How Elicit Searches Differently
When you ask Elicit a research question, it does not generate an answer from training data. Instead, it searches a database of over 200 million academic papers from Semantic Scholar and other sources. Results are ranked by relevance to your specific question, not just keyword matching. Elicit understands the semantic meaning of your query and finds papers that address your research question even if they use different terminology. For example, searching "Does intermittent fasting improve cognitive performance?" returns papers about time-restricted eating, caloric restriction, and meal timing effects on brain function — terms you might not have thought to search for.
Paper Analysis Features
Abstract summaries provide one-sentence descriptions of each paper's key finding, generated by AI that has read the actual abstract. Data extraction pulls specific information from papers into structured tables — sample size, methodology, key findings, effect sizes, confidence intervals, and more. You define what columns you want, and Elicit populates them by reading each paper. This turns weeks of manual data extraction into minutes. Paper details give you AI-generated summaries of the full text, including methodology, limitations, and conclusions, without you reading every page. Citation analysis shows which papers are most cited and how they relate to each other.
Systematic Review Workflow
Elicit is particularly powerful for systematic reviews and literature surveys. Start with your research question and let Elicit find relevant papers. Use filters to narrow by publication date, study type, sample size, or methodology. Create columns for the specific data points your review needs. Elicit fills in the table by analyzing each paper. Export to CSV for further analysis in Excel or statistical software. This workflow replaces the traditional process of manually searching databases, screening hundreds of abstracts, reading dozens of papers, and hand-extracting data into spreadsheets. What used to take weeks can be done in days.
Beyond Literature Reviews
Elicit is useful for more than formal academic research. Product managers use it to find evidence for or against feature decisions. Policy analysts search for research supporting specific interventions. Journalists verify claims with peer-reviewed evidence. Medical professionals search for latest treatment evidence. Grant writers identify supporting research for proposals. Students find sources for papers and theses. Anyone making evidence-based decisions benefits from efficient access to the academic literature.
Accuracy and Limitations
Elicit's summaries and extractions are AI-generated and can contain errors. Always verify critical data points against the original papers. The tool works best with well-structured academic papers and may struggle with humanities or qualitative research. Coverage depends on what is available in Semantic Scholar's database, which skews toward STEM fields. Papers behind paywalls may only have abstracts available for analysis. Despite these limitations, Elicit dramatically accelerates the research process and catches relevant papers that manual searching would miss.
Pricing
The free plan includes 5,000 paper results per month and basic features. Elicit Plus at $12/month provides higher result limits, full-text analysis, advanced data extraction, and bulk processing. Elicit Teams offers collaboration features with shared workspaces and annotations. Enterprise plans include API access, custom integrations, and organization-wide deployment. For the value delivered in research time savings, the pricing is remarkably affordable.
Getting Started
Visit elicit.com and type a research question — not keywords, but a full question like "What are the long-term effects of remote work on employee mental health?" Browse the results, which include relevance-ranked papers with AI summaries. Try the data extraction feature by adding custom columns to your results table. If you have ever spent days on a literature review, you will immediately see how Elicit transforms the process. Start with a topic you know well so you can evaluate the quality of results and summaries against your existing knowledge.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, Elicit searches a database of over 200 million real academic papers from Semantic Scholar and other sources. Every paper it returns is a real, published work with verifiable DOIs and citations. This is fundamentally different from ChatGPT, which can hallucinate fictitious citations.
Elicit can analyze full-text papers when they are openly available. For paywalled papers, it works with the abstract and available metadata. The Plus plan provides enhanced full-text analysis capabilities for more detailed data extraction.
Yes, anyone who needs evidence-based information benefits from Elicit. Product managers, policy analysts, journalists, medical professionals, and grant writers all use it to find peer-reviewed evidence. The tool works best for questions that have been studied in academic literature.