Elicit
by Elicit (Ought)
Getting-started guide
Searches and extracts from academic literature at speed — with a published accuracy gap you need to know about.
Current prices: Free, from $10/mo · See all plans
Last reviewed 2026-07-27 · for Elicit
You type a research question in plain language rather than a keyword string, and Elicit searches the academic literature and returns papers. You then name the columns you want — sample size, method, outcome — and it fills a table with those values from each paper, each cell linked to the passage it came from.
A research assistant for academic literature, searching well over a hundred million papers.
Built for finding relevant work and extracting comparable data across many papers at once.
Deliberately narrow — it works on published academic literature and cannot help with current events, industry topics, or anything whose evidence base is not academic.
Transparent by design: every extracted claim links back to its source passage.
There is a genuinely usable free tier that needs no card. Its exact limits are described inconsistently across third-party sources — check the current allowances in the product rather than trusting a comparison article, including this one.
Paid tiers for individuals are a modest monthly subscription, with a substantially more expensive tier adding large-scale screening and systematic-review workflows.
It searches published literature. If your question is about the last six months of anything, this is the wrong tool.
It is an accelerator, not a replacement for a proper search. See the security section — this is the single most important thing on this page.
The risk on this page is not privacy — it is trusting the output too much. The vendor's own benchmark reports very high screening sensitivity, tested against a large set of established systematic reviews. An independent study published in 2025 found that sensitivity dropped dramatically, to under 40 percent, when queries followed the search strategies real systematic reviews actually use.
Both numbers can be true. Benchmarks measure controlled conditions; the independent test measured field conditions. The gap between them is the thing to internalise: this tool performs far better on tidy questions than on the messy ones you will actually bring it. A search that feels comprehensive may have missed most of the relevant literature without telling you.
What does the evidence say about [your specific question]? I want the strongest findings on both sides, not a consensus summary.
Why this one: The semantic search is the genuine advantage over keyword databases, and it only shows up when you stop writing keyword strings.
Tweak: Compare the results against the same question in a keyword database. The overlap, and the gap, are both instructive.
Pulls specified fields out of every paper in your result set into columns.
Why this one: This is the time saving that justifies the tool, and it is the feature people discover last.
Tweak: Start with three columns you would have written down by hand anyway. Ambitious tables are harder to verify.
Clicks the link behind five cells in your extraction table and reads the passage each was taken from, checking the value matches.
Why this one: The single most important habit to build with this tool, and the reason the citation links exist.
Tweak: Pick the five that matter most to your argument, not five at random.
Puts the same question, as a keyword search, into a conventional academic database and compares the two result lists side by side.
Why this one: Directly exposes the recall gap the independent research identified, on your own topic.
Tweak: Count what the other search found that this one missed. That number is your calibration.
Want the full picture first? See the Elicit overview for pricing, the free tier and related tools.
