What is Elicit?
Elicit (Elicit.com) is an AI research assistant built specifically to streamline synthesis, literature search, and custom data extraction. Developed to replace tedious manual spreadsheet logging, Elicit allows researchers to convert unstructured research PDF papers into structured comparative tables in minutes.
Users can query open-ended research topics or upload a folder of custom PDF papers. Elicit reads each document, extracts specific columns (such as sample size, outcome measurements, dosage, participant demographics, or key limitations), and generates audit-ready summary rows.
Core Advantages for Literature Reviews
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Custom Column Extraction: Define custom prompts like "What statistical model was used?" or "What was the p-value?" and Elicit will pull exact snippets from papers.
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PDF Workspace Uploads: Drag and drop up to 100+ PDF documents to run automated matrix summaries across private internal papers.
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High Precision Summarization: Minimizes hallucination by enforcing strict quote-matching rules that map every extracted claim back to exact paragraph text.
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Exporting Capabilities: Export clean comparative tables directly to CSV, Excel, Zotero, or RIS bibliographies.
Best Use Cases
Elicit is particularly invaluable for systematic review authors, biomedical researchers, clinical trials reviewers, meta-analysts, and social science researchers needing rapid qualitative and quantitative data synthesis.