AI Tool Guides
Best for
AI-assisted literature review
Works on
Browser
Alternatives
Consensus, Connected Papers
Watch out
Free tier limited; academic focus may miss non-journal sources
What It Does
Elicit is a research assistant that automates literature reviews. Enter a research question and Elicit finds relevant papers, extracts key information (sample size, methodology, findings, limitations) into a structured table, and identifies themes across the results. It is particularly strong at decomposing broad questions into searchable sub-questions.
Setup in 5 Minutes
and sign up with Google or email.
- The free tier provides a generous monthly allowance of searches and
paper analyses.
- Upload your own PDFs for extraction, or search Elicit's index of
over 125 million papers.
Try This
Enter the question "What are the most effective strategies for
reducing employee burnout in healthcare?" Review the table of extracted
papers. Add columns for "Sample size" and "Country" to filter for
studies relevant to your context. Export the table to a spreadsheet as the
starting point for a literature review.
Follow Along
Follow Along — Mini Literature Review:
). Enter it into Elicit.
- From the results, select 10 papers. Add columns for Sample Size, Country, Key Finding, and Limitation.
- Let Elicit auto-extract where it can; manually fill any gaps by skimming the abstracts.
- Export the table to a spreadsheet. Highlight gaps—are most studies from one country? Is a particular age group under-studied? Write two sentences identifying the research gap you found.
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