Elicit - AI for scientific research

What Is Elicit: Your AI Research Partner for Scientific Discovery

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of scientific literature in your field? Picture this: you're a medical researcher tasked with understanding the latest treatments for a complex condition. PubMed returns thousands of results. Reading and synthesizing even a fraction of them would take weeks—time you simply don't have.

That's where Elicit comes in.

Elicit is an AI-powered research assistant designed specifically for scientific inquiry. Unlike generic AI chatbots, it's built from the ground up for academic research, trained on over 138 million academic papers and 545,000 clinical trials. It doesn't just generate text—it actually understands scientific methodology, can extract structured data from papers, and most importantly, tells you exactly where every piece of information comes from.

Since launching, Elicit has helped over 5 million researchers worldwide work faster and more accurately. Whether you're conducting a systematic literature review, preparing a research report, or staying current in your field, Elicit handles the heavy lifting of literature discovery and synthesis—so you can focus on what matters most: advancing knowledge.

Elicit's Core Capabilities: More Than Just Search

Think of Elicit as having a research assistant who never sleeps, never gets tired, and can read thousands of papers in minutes. But unlike a human assistant, Elicit provides something equally important: complete transparency.

Semantic Search That Actually Understands Your Questions

Traditional keyword search forces you to think like a search engine. Elicit works the other way around—you ask questions in plain English, and it finds relevant papers based on meaning, not exact word matches.

You might search: "What are the long-term effects of GLP-1 agonists on cardiovascular outcomes?" and Elicit will surface papers discussing related concepts—clinical trial results, meta-analyses, observational studies—even if they don't use those exact words. This semantic understanding is what separates Elicit from basic literature databases.

Research Reports: Literature Reviews in Minutes

Need to quickly understand a new research area? Elicit's Research Reports feature generates structured summaries based on the literature. You specify your research question, and Elicit:

• Identifies relevant papers from its massive database
• Extracts key findings, methodologies, and results
• Organizes everything into a coherent, readable report
• Cites every single claim with direct links to source sentences

Reports can incorporate up to 80 papers, giving you a comprehensive view of the evidence landscape. This isn't a superficial overview—Elicit applies systematic review methodology to ensure the synthesis is rigorous and reproducible.

Systematic Literature Review Automation

If you've ever conducted a systematic review, you know it's notoriously time-consuming. Screening thousands of titles and abstracts, extracting data from each paper, managing inclusion criteria—it's manual labor that can take months.

Elicit automates the screening and data extraction phases while maintaining methodological rigor. You define your inclusion criteria—perhaps papers studying patients with type 2 diabetes, aged 18-65, using specific interventions—and Elicit applies these criteria across thousands of papers automatically.

The results speak for themselves: VDI/VDE, a German education policy research institute, achieved 99.4% data extraction accuracy (1,502 out of 1,511 data points) while increasing the volume of evidence considered by 11 times. Users consistently report saving up to 80% of their systematic review time.

Research Library and Alerts

Research doesn't happen in isolation. Elicit's Library feature lets you save and organize relevant papers across projects, building your personal knowledge base over time.

Set up Alerts for specific topics, and Elicit proactively notifies you when new relevant research appears. The AI filters out noise—unlike generic email alerts that dump everything, Elicit only surfaces papers that genuinely match your interests.

Research Agents for Complex Workflows

For more sophisticated research needs, Elicit's Research Agents automate multi-step workflows. Need to analyze a competitive landscape? Map out all companies working in a specific therapeutic area? Research Agents can execute these complex, multi-stage research tasks autonomously, delivering structured outputs you can act on immediately.

Enterprise-Ready API

Organizations needing to integrate Elicit into their existing workflows can access the platform via RESTful API. This enables programmatic search, report generation, and data extraction—perfect for organizations building custom research tools or automating literature review pipelines at scale. API access requires a Pro plan or higher.

Who Uses Elicit: From Academic Labs to Pharmaceutical Giants

Elicit serves a diverse range of organizations, each with unique research needs but one common goal: making sense of the exploding scientific literature faster and more accurately.

Pharmaceutical Companies

Developing new drugs requires understanding every relevant piece of existing research—a process that traditionally takes months of literature review. Elicit accelerates this dramatically.

Oxford PharmaGenesis, a leading health communications consultancy serving 8 of the world's top 10 pharmaceutical companies, used Elicit to review 500 papers and answer 40 research questions for a major client. What would have taken weeks was completed in days.

Formation Bio, an AI-driven drug development company, processed 1,600 papers for a knee osteoarthritis literature assessment—work that would typically take months completed in weeks, with 10x faster throughput.

Academic Researchers

Individual researchers and academic labs use Elicit for everything from quick literature checks to full systematic reviews. Graduate students use it to efficiently survey their fields. Faculty use it to stay current with rapidly evolving literature. Tenured professors use it to speed up grant-writing literature reviews.

Medical Device and Technology Companies

When designing new products, medical device companies need to understand the clinical evidence landscape. Elicit helps them find relevant clinical trials, understand safety and efficacy data, and identify gaps their products might address.

Government and Policy Makers

Evidence-based policy requires evidence. Government agencies and policy research organizations use Elicit to quickly surface relevant research on topics from public health interventions to environmental regulations, ensuring policy decisions are grounded in scientific reality.

Industry Beyond Healthcare

The same capabilities that help pharmaceutical companies apply to any field where scientific literature matters: consumer goods companies researching ingredient safety, industrial manufacturers exploring new materials, technology companies tracking the latest algorithmic advances.

What Researchers Say: Real Results, Real Impact

"Elicit has transformed how we approach literature reviews. What used to take our team months now takes weeks—and the quality of synthesis is every bit as rigorous." — Research Lead, Top 10 Pharmaceutical Company

"The sentence-level citations are a game-changer. In academic research, you can't afford to cite something that isn't real. With Elicit, every claim is traceable back to the source." — PhD Candidate, Biomedical Sciences

"We increased our evidence volume by 11x while maintaining 99.4% accuracy in data extraction. That's unheard of in systematic review work." — VDI/VDE Research Team

Pricing and Plans: Enterprise-Grade Research, Tailored to Your Organization

Elicit operates on a contact-based pricing model designed to serve organizations of all sizes. Rather than fixed tiers, pricing is customized based on your organization's specific needs, usage requirements, and deployment preferences.

What's included across plans:

• Search across 138M+ academic papers
• Research Report generation
• Systematic Review automation
• Library and Alerts
• Sentence-level citations on all outputs
• API access (Pro plan and above)

For academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and research organizations with specific requirements, Elicit's team works with you to build a plan that fits your workflows.

To discuss your organization's needs and get a custom quote, the best approach is to reach out directly through their sales team.

Ready to Transform Your Research?

The pace of scientific discovery is accelerating faster than ever—hundreds of thousands of new papers published each year. Trying to keep up manually is like trying to drink from a firehose.

Elicit gives you the tools to not just keep up, but to synthesize and build on the collective scientific knowledge at scale. With over 5 million researchers already using the platform, and validated results showing dramatic time savings and accuracy improvements, the question isn't whether AI will transform scientific research—it's whether you'll be among those leading the change.

Start exploring Elicit today and experience what it means to have a research assistant that reads everything, cites everything, and helps you find the signal in the noise.