Elicit is an AI research assistant designed to aid researchers and academics in managing and analyzing academic literature. Developed by the organization Ought, Elicit functions as an independent public benefit corporation.

The platform offers powerful tools for automating literature reviews and other research tasks, such as evaluating project directions and augmented reading. Users can upload PDFs, summarize multiple papers, and ask specific questions about the content of the papers. The system is structured to handle a vast array of academic papers, making it particularly suitable for empirical research areas like biomedicine and machine learning.
Elicit recently introduced a feature called Notebooks, which enhances the user's ability to manage research papers by allowing them to combine papers, chat with selected papers, create flexible summaries, and conduct systematic literature searches within a single interface.
The platform operates on a credit system for running queries, with different subscription plans offering varying amounts of monthly credits. This model supports both individual researchers and large institutions through customizable plans.
Elicit offers a range of features app designed to assist researchers and academics in their work, including:
- Upload and Summarize Papers: Users can upload their own PDFs and get quick summaries of the papers, helping them to quickly understand key findings and data points
- Question-Answering from Papers: Elicit allows users to ask specific questions about the content of papers, and it provides answers by extracting information directly from the texts. This is especially useful for detailed literature reviews and understanding complex studies
- Notebooks Interface: A newly introduced feature that revolutionizes how users interact with research papers. It enables users to combine papers from multiple searches, chat with them, create summaries, and conduct systematic literature searches—all on one page. This facilitates a more dynamic and integrated approach to research
- Search and Extraction: Elicit enables searching across 125 million academic papers using natural language queries. It also offers tools for extracting detailed information from papers at a fraction of the time and cost of manual methods, making it a time-efficient tool for academic research
- Customizable Credits System: Elicit operates on a credit system, where actions like searching for papers or extracting data consume credits. There are various subscription plans available that offer different numbers of monthly credits, catering to individual needs and institutional demands
These features app are designed to make the research process more efficient and are particularly effective in empirical domains that involve experiments and concrete results, such as biomedicine and machine learning