Elicit — Guide | AI devotee

Elicit — User Guide

Research assistant; literature review.

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Strengths

Automatically extract key information from papers (methods, sample size, conclusions, etc.)
Build a structured literature review form
Support custom extraction fields
PDFs can be uploaded for analysis
Suitable for systematic reviews and meta-analyses

Best for

systematic literature review
Quickly understand the key information of multiple papers
Construct a research comparison table
Discover research gaps and trends
Documentation for academic writing

Literature review workflow

The most powerful function of Elicit is to automatically organize information from multiple papers into tables.

Scenario

Construct a literature review form

Prompt example

Steps:
1. Search for research questions in Elicit:
   "What are the effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance?"

2. The system returns a list of related papers

3. Select the paper to be analyzed (multiple choices are allowed)

4. Click "Extract data" and select the extraction fields:
   - Study design
   - Sample size
   - Intervention
   - Outcome measures
   - Key findings

5. Elicit automatically extracts information from each paper
6. Generate structured comparison table

Output / what to expect

Generate a table containing key information about all papers,

You can quickly compare the methods and conclusions of different studies,

Export to CSV for further analysis.

Tips

When customizing extraction fields, the more specific the better, for example "intervention dose" is more valuable than "intervention measure".

Scenario

Upload PDF for analysis

Prompt example

Steps:


1. Click "Upload PDFs" to upload the paper


2. Support batch upload (up to 200 articles)


3. Wait for AI processing (about 1-2 minutes/article)


4. Select all uploaded papers


5. Extract key information




Suitable scenarios:


- There is already a list of literature that needs to be sorted out quickly


- Collection of papers shared by tutors or colleagues


- Documents exported from the database

Output / what to expect

Process uploaded papers in batches,

Automatically extract key information,

No need to manually read the full text of each paper.

Tips

Make sure the PDF is in a searchable text format before uploading. Scanned PDFs will have poor extraction results.

Research problem analysis

Elicit can help analyze research questions and identify research gaps and trends.

Scenario

Discover research trends

Prompt example

After searching for research topics in Elicit:

1. View the "Concepts" tab
   - Frequency of occurrence of related concepts
   - Study hot words

2. Check the publication year distribution
   - Growing trends in research in this field
   - Are there any new research directions in recent years?

3. View the distribution of research methods
   - What are the mainstream research methods?
   - Are there any methodological gaps?

Output / what to expect

Through trend analysis,

Understand the development direction of the research field,

Discover possible research opportunities.

Tips

Research trend analysis is very helpful in determining research directions and writing research proposals.

Compared with similar tools

Tool	Strength	Best for	Pricing
Elicit This tool	Automatically extract paper information and build review tables, a powerful tool for systematic reviews	Researchers, systematic literature review, paper information extraction	Free version (limited)/Plus $10/month
Consensus	Directly extract research conclusions, friendly to non-professionals	Understand research consensus and inquire about health issues	Free version / Pro $8.99/month
Semantic Scholar	The largest number of papers, completely free	Extensive academic search	completely free
ResearchRabbit	Paper correlation map to discover relevant research	Discover relevant papers and understand the research context	completely free

Sources & references:

Elicit official website (2025-03)