Elicit
Elicit is an AI research assistant, built by Ought, for reviewing, summarizing, and synthesizing academic literature. It automates the repetitive parts of evidence synthesis — finding relevant papers, summarizing results, extracting data, and organizing insights — and, unlike a standard search engine, structures what it pulls from papers into formats you can actually analyze.
Core capabilities
- Automated literature review — surfaces papers relevant to a research question and highlights key findings without manual screening.
- Paper summaries — structured digests covering methods, participants, and outcomes.
- Data extraction — pulls quantitative and qualitative results from PDFs and abstracts.
- Structured tables — organizes extracted data into side-by-side tables for comparison across studies.
- Custom workflows — build reusable steps for summarizing abstracts, comparing study designs, or aggregating results.
- Citation tracking — links every result to its source for verifiability.
Where it fits. Systematic literature reviews, digesting long papers into method-and-conclusion summaries, synthesizing findings across sources to spot consensus and gaps, evidence-based policy support, and assembling references for academic writing.
Pricing.
- Free — basic paper search and summaries.
- Pro — advanced extraction, workflow customization, and export (pricing varies, typically $10-$25/month).
- Team / Institutional — bulk workflows and integrations for university or enterprise use.
Practical notes. Elicit differs from general retrieval tools like Perplexity by focusing purely on academic research synthesis. Its edge is turning unstructured research data into structured tables — it automates the tedious gathering while leaving interpretation to you. Confirm current pricing on the official site.
Direct link: https://elicit.org
