Elicit
AI research assistant for academic literature reviews
Overview
Elicit searches 138M+ academic papers, extracts findings into structured tables and drafts literature reviews with citations back to source text. Strong for systematic reviews across medical, social and natural sciences; a functional free tier covers search, summaries and paper chat.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- Unlimited search of 138M+ papers
- Unlimited summaries
- Chat with full-text papers
- Limited reports/agent usage
- Standard report and agent usage
- Systematic review workflow (5,000 papers)
- 20 table columns at a time
- Custom extractions from uploads
- 5x Pro usage
- Figure extraction
- Real-time team collaboration
- 30 table columns at a time
- Screen 40,000 papers
- SSO, SAML and 2FA
- Dedicated customer success
- Custom usage levels
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
Elicit in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
Elicit owns the literature-review niche: it searches 138 million papers, pulls methods, sample sizes and findings into structured comparison tables, and links every extraction back to source text, which makes verification far faster than with a general chatbot. For systematic reviews it can compress days of screening and extraction into hours, and the free tier is genuinely functional. Treat it as an accelerator, not an oracle — independent testing puts extraction accuracy near 90%, but a 2025 Cochrane-methods study found recall dropped to 37.9% under realistic systematic-review search strategies, so it can't replace database searching for publication-grade work, and every extracted number still needs checking. Paid tiers (Pro $49/month billed annually, Scale $169) unlock reports and the dedicated systematic-review workflow. English-first, globally available, and well suited to ASEAN academia.
What people say
A 2025 study in Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods put a number on the gap between Elicit's marketing and its field performance. The company's own validation reported 96.9% sensitivity for surfacing relevant papers; when queries followed real systematic-review search strategies, sensitivity fell to 37.9%. That single finding frames how researchers should use the tool — as a fast first pass and extraction engine, never as a replacement for proper database searching.
Used that way, the reviews are strong. Independent evaluations put data-extraction accuracy near 90%, and a SAGE proof-of-concept study found Elicit workable as a semi-automated second reviewer for extraction in systematic reviews. Because every claim links back to source text, checking its work is fast, and Reddit's academic communities consistently recommend it for structured extraction — pulling methods, sample sizes and findings into comparison tables across hundreds of papers. Documented failure modes are the usual LLM ones: wrong participant counts, a hallucinated control group, fabricated numbers when the real answer wasn't in the paper.
The free Basic tier is genuinely usable — unlimited search across the 138-million-paper corpus, unlimited summaries, and chat with full-text papers — which is rarer than it should be in this category. Pro at $49/month (billed annually) adds standard usage for research reports and a systematic-review workflow that screens up to 5,000 papers; Scale at $169/month adds figure extraction and real-time collaboration. The vendor claims over five million researchers use it.
For ASEAN academics working in English-language literature, it's one of the easier recommendations in the research category — provided the 37.9% figure stays taped to the monitor.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- Elicit has access to over 200 million academic papers via the Semantic Scholar database, one of the largest open academic literature databases in the world.
- The tool can extract specific data columns from a set of papers in seconds — a task that previously required a team of research assistants working for weeks.
- Elicit was built by Ought, a non-profit organisation, with a mission to make rigorous research methods more accessible rather than to maximise revenue.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Elicit's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Elicit unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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