Elicit is built for people who need to work through a large body of research. You ask a research question, and it finds relevant papers and shows a table with key details such as the study design, sample size, and results. You can add columns for the things you care about, and Elicit extracts the answers from each paper, so a review that might take days of reading can be started in an afternoon. Each extracted point links back to the passage in the paper it came from.
For larger projects, it automates the slow steps of a systematic review. It can screen hundreds or thousands of papers against inclusion criteria, extract data into a structured table, and write a report with sentence-level citations. You can upload your own PDFs as well as searching its database of academic literature. Researchers use it for literature reviews, evidence summaries, market and policy research, and checking what is known about a question before starting a study.
There is a free tier with limited use and paid plans that raise the number of papers and extractions. The summaries are only as reliable as the model reading the papers, so important claims should be checked against the source, especially with technical or ambiguous results. Consensus, Scite, and SciSpace overlap on parts of the workflow, while Elicit stands out for structured extraction across many papers at once. It supports research work but does not replace the judgment of the researcher.