The emerging class of AI research assistants — powerful, and to be used with care.
At a Glance
| Publisher | Elicit (Ought), representative of a category that includes Consensus, SciSpace, scite Assistant, and Undermind |
| Coverage | LLM-driven search, screening, and data extraction over large scholarly corpora (Elicit draws on the Semantic Scholar corpus), returning summaries and structured tables |
| Access | freemium (free tier; paid plans for scale and advanced extraction) |
| Regional | global. |
Our Take
AI search tools like Elicit change the shape of literature work — describe a question in natural language and get relevant papers, summarized claims, and extracted data in a table, compressing hours of screening into minutes. For scoping, quick evidence gathering, and first-pass extraction they’re genuinely useful and improving fast. The essential caveat is that these are LLM-mediated: they can miss relevant work, misread a finding, or present a confident summary that the source doesn’t fully support, so every extracted claim needs checking against the paper. Use them to accelerate discovery and first-pass extraction; verify before relying, and never let an AI summary stand in for reading the methods.
Power Tips
- Use Elicit to scope a question and draft an extraction table fast, then open the source papers to confirm every claim before it enters your analysis
- treat AI-surfaced results as a starting set, not a complete search — back a systematic review with a proper database search and human screening.
Alternatives & Complements
Semantic Scholar · Scite · Consensus · SciSpace · Undermind.
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