In this post, I‘ll review Elicit AI. I tested it for AI-assisted, research-focused writing and will show you the results, and go through the pros and cons. In my reviews, I’ll only test free tools or tools with a free trial available.
Let’s dive in!
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How to Use It
Here is how to get started with Elicit. Click on here to enter their website and sign up using your email or Google account.
Next, you can compare and pick your plan. I’m testing out the Basic plan.
And you should land here, your dashboard.
My Experience
I went with the Basic plan and will show you the key features of Elicit AI.
Hypothetically, if we were to conduct a literature review search with Elicit, the first step of the workflow would be to find papers and start formulating the research question. Start with “Find papers” feature, formulate a full question instead of keywords and Elicit AI will conduct a search to find relevant papers.
Here is my example question.
You can filter the results by publication date or study type. You can also add custom columns to extract specific information. Below, I added a custom column called “Sample size,” and you can see how it retrieved the sample size from each paper. By clicking the asterisk (*), you can see where in the paper the information was found, highlighted.
With the “Research report” feature, you can automatically generate a full report based on your research question. Let me demonstrate.
Again, we are curious about the impact of magnesium on sleep and stress.
Elicit will conduct a quick search through its large database and find relevant papers. Then, it’ll pull out the data wanted and generate a detailed report that summarized the main findings and provides citations.
You can see the different steps of the research report generation in the right-side panel. The chat feature appears to be available only on the paid plan. You have the freedom to edit these steps as you like, for example, to modify which papers are included in your report, how data was extracted etc.
And once your report is generated, you can download it as PDF. It’s useful for summarizing your research question and you can use it as a starting point for your literature review.
Here is a breakdown of how the tool screened different sources and extracted data.
Finally, this feature allows you to upload papers from your device that will be added to your private library. You can extract information from those or include them in the Research report. The “Chat with Papers” feature allows you to interact with your uploaded papers through a chat interface, where you can ask questions or perform other prompt-based tasks.
Pros
- You can filter results by custom columns
- Extracting information from papers is convenient
- Good for literature search
- Can upload your own papers and interact with them
Cons
- I recommend validating the citations and facts by hand
- No Word, Google Docs or LaTex integrations
- Some learning curve exists
- No writing assistant (with the Basic plan at least)
Pricing
Here are the pricing plans of Elicit AI.
- Basic: $0 /month
- Plus: $10 /month
- Pro: $42 /month
+ a separate plan for Teams
To Take Home
Elicit is a research assistant that helps you find and summarize academic papers, extract key data, and organize your findings. You can also chat with uploaded papers and ask questions directly. This makes going through papers significantly faster.
It might take a bit of time to learn how to get the most out of Elicit, even though the UI is quite simple and there aren’t too many features. I recommend checking out the Elicit Help Center, which has short articles that walk you through the features and share useful tips.
Elicit lets you filter results and pull out specific data using custom columns, which is super convenient. The tool also lists the sources it finds in a clear, informative table. Overall, it’s a great option for literature searches, but as a full research assistant, it’s missing writing support features.