Elicit is essentially a research assistant which rapidly searches academic articles. You put a question in. It searches 125-126 million articles via Semantic Scholar.
And then it’s better than any lit review since it weaves less than 8-14 summaries, data tables, quotations, and possibly other stuff, easily, and fast.
What it actually does for me
Turns long reviews of literature in short distilled, or combined intelligence. You can star papers, create custom search terms, and export tables to CSV or Bib.
Other nice items include journal rank prior to publication, citations, a flag for “can I trust this?”, and critiques that came into the summary all in one shot.
The pricing landscape, honest and straightforward.
You can begin with a Basic plan for free. You can unlimited search but only 4 summaries, and only 20 PDFs extraction a month.
If you search more than that, Plus is $12/mo (or $120/yr), that’s more PDF extractions and slightly better table tools.
If you try to search, Pro is $49/mo, or $499/yr, more PDFs extractions, more alerts, more columns systemic review workflows.
Then there are Team plans for collaborative type scenarios, and Enterprise for corporate type, all custom pricing.
What’s Good (Pros)
When your keyword search terms do not completely match those of the paper, it finds papers smart search. It’s efficient 50% time savings could be, I’ve seen researchers saving up to 5 hours a week in total.
The summaries were comprehensive and had quotes and the sources were transparent no fluff.
You can extract the data into tables, filter, export very useful.
A Couple ‘Meh’ Things (Cons)
It is not 100% down the line more like 80-90% so you’ll need to validate.
It is dependent on/likely needs Semantic Scholar some content could be paywalled and missed from searches. At times, it could miss some nuance or misinterpret a number it is early stage AI in that regard.
Short Succinct summary flow
Your workflow, ask a research question Elicit pulls top papers provides a number of succinct summaries you pick, filter, extract, and export your data you edit, augment or explore if needed.
It is swift, semantically intelligent, and you can trust either the Elicit generated summaries or the source where the information came.
Final Thoughts
Elicit seems like an obvious choice for aiding literature reviews and evidence synthesis. It really does feel like Google Scholar matured and morphed into a research buddy.
Simply stay on your toes be prcise with your key facts, and utilize the additional features when necessary if you want to go deeper.
