What is Elicit?
Elicit is an AI research assistant built for one job: working through academic literature fast. Ask a question and it searches a corpus of over 138 million papers, pulls the most relevant ones, summarises each paper’s findings and arranges everything into a table you can extend with custom columns — sample size, methods, limitations — extracted automatically. For literature reviews it saves genuine hours over hand-searching databases. The free plan is generous for light use, with unlimited search and paper chat; the $12/month Plus tier adds more automated reports, while systematic-review workflows sit up on the $49/month Pro tier. Two cautions: extraction still makes occasional mistakes, so spot-check anything you’ll cite, and coverage leans toward open-access sources — paywalled full texts can be out of reach.
Best for: Literature reviews and evidence-gathering across academic papers.
Elicit pricing
| Plan | Price | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 | A monthly allowance of credits for searching and screening papers. Enough to evaluate whether it fits your workflow. |
| Plus | from $12/mo | A much larger credit allowance, full-text extraction and larger review tables. The realistic tier for an active researcher. |
| Pro / Teams | from $49/mo | High-volume systematic review work with collaboration features. |
Prices checked 27 July 2026. Vendors change limits often — treat the caps as indicative and confirm on the pricing page before you buy.
What Elicit is good at
- Finding relevant papers when you do not yet know the right search terms
- Extracting the same data point across dozens of papers into one table
- Screening a large set of abstracts down to the ones worth reading
- Getting oriented at the start of a literature review
Start a literature review from scratch
- Enter your research question as a question, not keywords. It is built for that.
- Skim the returned papers and star the genuinely relevant ones.
- Add columns for the data you need — sample size, method, outcome — and let it extract across all of them.
- Export the table, then read the starred papers properly. The table tells you where to look, not what to think.
Who should skip Elicit
- Anyone outside academic or clinical research — it is a specialist tool.
- Subjects thinly covered in indexed literature; it can only work with what is published.
- Replacing your own reading. It narrows the pile; it does not do the thinking.
What's good
- Searches 138M+ papers with plain-English questions
- Extracts findings into comparable, exportable tables
- Free plan includes unlimited search and paper chat
- Purpose-built for literature review, not general chat
Watch-outs
- Data extraction still makes mistakes — verify before citing
- Systematic-review workflow needs the $49/mo Pro plan
- Paywalled papers are often limited to abstracts
Elicit FAQ
- Is Elicit free?
- There is a free tier with a monthly credit allowance — enough to test whether it suits your work, not enough for a full systematic review.
- Is Elicit accurate enough for academic work?
- For finding and screening papers, yes, and it cites everything. For extracted data points, verify against the paper before you cite them — it is a research accelerator, not a source.
- How is Elicit different from Perplexity?
- Elicit searches academic literature specifically and extracts structured data across many papers. Perplexity searches the open web. For a literature review, Elicit; for general research, Perplexity.
The verdict
Elicit earns a 4/5 from us. There’s a free way in, so it’s low-risk to try. AI research assistant for academic papers and evidence.