Name: Elicit
Price: Freemium

What is Elicit?

Elicit is a research assistant built by Ought for genuine academic work rather than general question answering. It searches a very large indexed corpus of papers, screens them against your criteria, and extracts structured data into tables, which is precisely the labour that makes systematic reviews slow. It supports PRISMA-aligned screening workflows and produces sentence-level citations, and its own materials report use by millions of researchers. Two things shape the decision. Pricing is credit-based across free, mid and higher tiers, with published figures varying by source between roughly $10 and $169 monthly depending on plan and billing, so check the live page. And its strength is field-dependent: Elicit performs best in empirical disciplines with structured methods and quantitative results, and less well in theoretical or humanities work where findings do not sit neatly in extraction columns.

Key Features

138M+ Paper DatabaseSentence-Level CitationsAutomated Data ExtractionCustom Column BuilderSystematic Review WorkflowsPRISMA 2020 SupportResearch AlertsCSV and RIS ExportChat with PapersAI Research BriefsTopic FinderAbstract Screening AutomationFull-Text ScreeningAuthor SearchZotero IntegrationResearch Question BrainstormingCollaborative Sharing

How to Use Elicit

1Sign up free at elicit.com

2Type your research question in natural language

3Browse AI-ranked relevant papers with summaries

4Add papers to your workspace and extract structured data

5Export findings as CSV, BIB, or RIS or generate a research brief

✅ Best For

PhD students and academic researchers conducting systematic literature reviews who need auditable, reproducible workflows that satisfy journal and institutional standards.
Clinical researchers and biotech teams running evidence synthesis at scale, needing to screen thousands of abstracts in hours rather than weeks.
Policy analysts and consultants who must back recommendations with peer-reviewed evidence and need structured data extracted across dozens of studies.

❌ Not For

Users who need a writing assistant or manuscript editor alongside their research tool, as Elicit focuses entirely on literature discovery and extraction.
Researchers working primarily with grey literature, news sources, or non-academic content, since Elicit indexes only peer-reviewed academic papers.

Reviews

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Pricing

Basic$0

✓Unlimited search
✓unlimited paper summaries
✓20 data extractions/month

Plus$12/mo

✓600 extractions/year
✓CSV export
✓high-accuracy mode

Pro$49/mo

✓2
✓400 extractions/year
✓systematic reviews
✓20 custom columns

Team$79/seat/mo

✓Collaborative reviews
✓pooled quotas
✓admin panel

Prompts to Try

What does the research say about cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia?

Find papers studying the effect of microplastics on marine ecosystems

Compare methodologies used in randomized controlled trials on metformin

Use Cases

A PhD candidate in public health uses Elicit to screen 800 abstracts for her systematic review on urban heat islands, finishing in one afternoon instead of three weeks, with every inclusion decision logged for her thesis committee.

A clinical research team at a biotech firm uses Elicit's extraction tables to pull efficacy data and sample sizes from 200 RCTs on a novel drug compound, building a structured evidence map in under a day.

A policy researcher uses Elicit Alerts to automatically receive new papers on plastic pollution legislation every week, staying current without spending hours on manual database searches.

A science journalist uses Elicit to find the most-cited recent papers on antibiotic resistance, quickly identifying which studies the medical community considers most credible.

A master's student uses Elicit's Topic Finder to discover 15 related research angles she hadn't considered, reshaping her literature review before submission.

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