Elicit review
A focused research assistant for structured literature reviews and evidence gathering.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
Elicit is a web-based AI research assistant for researchers, analysts, academics, and teams. It combines semantic and keyword search across academic papers and clinical trials with source filters, paper summaries, research-agent workflows, structured reports, and sentence-level citations. Its strongest fit is structured literature review work: users can organize sources into collections and tags, configure screening criteria, extract data, and track newly relevant papers with alerts.
The published plans show a freemium structure. Basic provides unlimited search across more than 138 million papers, unlimited summaries, full-text chat with papers, source views for answers, and Zotero import. Plus costs $11 per user per month with annual billing and adds exports to RIS, CSV, BIB, PDF, and DOCX, five table columns at a time, search across more than 500,000 clinical trials, and standard usage for Research Agent, Research Reports, and Systematic Literature Reviews. Pro costs $39 per user per month with annual billing and adds 5x usage, screening for 5,000 papers, extraction from up to 135 data sources, and API access. Scale costs $89 per user per month with annual billing and adds 9x usage, figure interpretation, live editing, real-time collaboration, usage tracking, and seat management. Enterprise adds custom usage, unlimited paper alerts, SSO and SAML, 2FA, analytics, domain verification, and custom deployments and integrations.
Elicit stands out when research requires more than finding papers. Its workflows connect search, screening, extraction, reports, citations, source passages, alerts, and exports in one research environment, while the API supports programmatic search and report generation. The focus is narrower than a general web search engine: its core value is evidence work across scientific literature, clinical trials, public data sources, and uploaded documents. Choose Elicit for repeatable literature reviews and citation-aware research reports. Teams needing deeper collaboration, administration, or programmatic access should evaluate the Scale, Enterprise, or Pro tiers respectively.
Elicit pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Semantic search across more than 138 million academic papers
- Systematic-review screening, reports, and sentence-level citations
- API access, exports, alerts, and Zotero import across paid plans
- Where it doesn't
- Advanced workflow usage increases across paid tiers
- 5,000-paper screening is available only with Pro
- The documented integration list centers on Zotero
Elicit fact sheet, pricing and score →
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