Yes. Elicit has a free plan for searching papers and trying its summaries and extraction with limits. Paid plans add higher limits and more advanced review workflows.

What makes Elicit different from Google Scholar?

Google Scholar gives you a list of papers. Elicit reads the papers for you, summarises them and pulls out the details you choose, such as sample size or outcomes, into a table you can compare.

Can Elicit do a systematic review?

Elicit supports the main steps, including searching, screening papers against criteria and extracting data. Researchers still need to define the protocol and verify the results.

Can I upload my own PDFs?

Yes. You can upload papers you already have and use the same summary and extraction features on them.

How accurate is Elicit's data extraction?

It is useful and fast, but not perfect. Elicit links each extracted value to the source text so you can check it quickly, which you should do before publishing results.

What is Elicit? Features, pros, cons and alternatives (2026)

What is Elicit?

Elicit is an AI research assistant designed for academic and scientific work. It searches a large database of research papers, summarises the most relevant ones and, most importantly, extracts specific information from each paper into a table. If you’ve ever copied sample sizes, methods and outcomes from dozens of studies into a spreadsheet by hand, Elicit automates much of that process.

Key features

Semantic paper search. Ask a research question in plain language and get relevant papers even if they use different terms.
Paper summaries. See the key finding of each paper in one line.
Data extraction. Add columns such as intervention, population, sample size or main outcome, and Elicit fills them for every paper.
Screening. Define inclusion criteria and let Elicit help sort papers in or out.
Research reports. Generate a structured report on a question, with citations for every claim.
Your own PDFs. Upload papers you already have to analyse them the same way.

How to get started

Create an account at elicit.com.
Enter a specific research question.
Review the list of papers and their one-line summaries.
Add extraction columns for the data you need and let Elicit fill the table.
Check a sample of extracted values against the source text, then export the table.

Who Elicit is for

PhD students and academics doing literature reviews, research teams in pharma and life sciences, policy analysts, UX researchers looking for academic evidence, and consultants who need to summarise a field quickly and credibly.

Tips for using Elicit well

Be precise. Narrow questions produce more relevant papers and cleaner tables.
Define columns carefully. “Primary outcome measure” is clearer than “result”.
Prepare uploads. Split huge PDF collections or supplements into separate papers with the free split PDF tool, or combine scattered parts with merge PDF.
Clean reference lists. When merging exports from several searches, remove repeated entries with remove duplicate lines.
Keep a human in the loop. Verify every value that goes into a publication.

Elicit vs alternatives

Consensus is faster for quick evidence checks on a single question. NotebookLM is better for studying a fixed set of documents deeply. Perplexity covers the whole web rather than only research. General assistants such as Claude can analyse uploaded papers well but don’t search academic databases for you.

Is Elicit worth it?

For anyone doing literature reviews, Elicit can save an enormous amount of manual work, especially at the extraction stage. The free plan is enough to test it on a real question. Researchers who review literature regularly will usually find a paid plan worthwhile, as long as they treat the output as a well-organised first pass that still needs expert checking.

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