Paper Search | Elicit: Al for scientific research

AI search for researchers

Find more and better scientific evidence with Elicit

Data sources

Understand what is already known

Elicit is your one-stop shop to search over high-quality scientific sources

Academic papers

Search over 138 million academic papers and conference proceedings

Updates weekly

Included sources

Clinical trials

Search over 545,000 trials

registered on clinicaltrials.gov

Updates in real-time

Included sources

BYOData

Upload your own documents

Integrate company subscriptions to access more full-text papers

Supported files

What makes Elicit search unique?

Beyond keywords

Find the best papers even if you don't know all the right keywords in a research area!

Transparent screening criteria

You can always see why Elicit included or excluded certain papers.

Analyzes up to 1,000 papers at once

No other AI tool achieves this level of scale.

How does Elicit's AI search work?

Step 1

Ask the right question

Asking the right question is half the battle. Elicit helps specify broad research questions and points out ways to clarify your analysis.

Step 2

Rank all papers in our database by similarity to your query

We then use custom embedding models to find the papers which are most likely to be relevant to your question, including looking at features like citation count and recency.

This means we primarily rank papers by similarity in content or meaning, not keyword frequency.

Step 3

Deeper review of top 1,000 papers

We take the top 1,000 papers and use LLMs to prioritize further based on relevance to your research question.

Depending on your Elicit plan and workflow, we will then show you anywhere from the top 4 to the top 1,000 most relevant papers.

Step 4

Natural language screening

You have the option to run custom screening questions over these papers to narrow down further.

Examples of Elicit Search in action

Example searches

A quick search to find many papers

Online vs. face-to-face CBT for treating depression

As part of a research report

Biomarkers used for seizures associated with Lennox-Gastaut

As part of systematic literature reviews

Targets for metastatic neuroendocrine prostate cancer

Workflows

Search lays the foundation for insight

Too much information without insight is a burden. Elicit helps you synthesize the papers you find through many workflows.

Research reports

Generate 10+page literature reviews of the papers you find to summarize all of the evidence that's been published.

Systematic reviews

You can use Elicit search to supplement a search protocol for a systematic review.

Alerts

If a search has been useful, set an alert for it so you can follow along with any new research that comes out

FAQ

Do you have access to paywalled papers or only open access?

How do you rank sources or determine quality?

Can I search for papers in languages other than English?

How often do you update your database?

How many databases do you search?