Complete guide to Elicit

Getting started

Sign up for free at elicit.com. Enter your research question or upload your own papers, and Elicit will search more than 125 million academic articles to show you the most relevant ones with automatic summaries. You can chat directly with the content of the papers, extract specific data (methods, results, sample sizes) into comparison tables, and use the new Research Agents to have the AI autonomously research a full topic in multiple steps.

Use cases

Advanced setup

1. Configure extraction columns
   In the systematic review workflow, define which variables you want to extract from each paper (up to 30 columns on the Scale plan) before running the analysis.
2. Enable real-time collaboration
   Available on the Scale plan, it lets multiple researchers edit the same extraction table simultaneously.
3. Set up the API
   Generate an API key from the developer dashboard to integrate paper search and data extraction into your own tools.
4. Managing automated reports
   The free plan allows 2 automated reports per month; check your plan's limit under Settings > Usage before requesting more.

Tips

• Use chat with papers to ask specific questions about methodology without having to read the entire article from start to finish.
• Combine Research Agents with a broad question to get an initial map of the field of study before narrowing down your review.
• Take advantage of the free plan (unlimited search and summaries) if you only need to explore literature occasionally, without bulk data extraction.
• Always verify automatically extracted data against the original paper, since table extraction can make mistakes with exact figures.

FAQ