Filtering in Elicit

Elicit provides several ways to narrow your search results: natural language in your query, the Filter button in the UI, and advanced search syntax. This guide covers all of them in one place. Some filter types work only with specific tools and workflows in Elicit.

Note that filters are not screening criteria. To narrow your papers by specific or custom screening criteria, please use the Screening function of the Systematic Review workflow.

The simplest way to filter is to just say what you want in your Find Papers or Systematic Review query. Elicit will automatically detect and apply the right filter.

By date:

"Papers about the benefits of taking L-theanine published after 2020"

By study type:

"RCTs on L-theanine published after 2020"

Supported study types include: randomized controlled trial, systematic review, meta-analysis, review, and longitudinal.

Combining criteria: You can mix and match in a single query — Elicit will pick up multiple filter criteria at once:

"Full-text RCTs on creatine published after 2018"

Click the Filter button at the top of the Find Papers table or in the Systematic Review workflow to access filter controls in the UI. These can be used alongside natural language filters or on their own.

Find Papers:

Systematic Reviews:

Set a date range to restrict results to papers published within a specific window. You can set a start year, end year, or both.

Use the Journal quality slider to restrict results to papers from higher-ranked journals.

• Slide from right to left to increase the minimum quality threshold

• Q4 — all ranked journals

• Q3 — top 75% of journals

• Q2 — top 50% of journals

• Q1 — top 25% of journals only

• The default setting (All) also includes papers from unranked journals

Rankings are based on the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), which measures a journal's prestige based on the number and quality of citations it receives. Click Save to apply the filter.

Select the study types you want to include in your search. All paper types will be included if you don't make a filter selection. The filter options include Review, Meta-Analysis, Systematic Review, RCT, and Longitudinal

Set keywords that the abstract contains or does not contain. If you add more than one keyword the keywords are treated as AND, e.g., the abstract must contain all keywords listed to be included.

Elicit can search clinical trial registrations in addition to research papers. Clinical trials have their own set of filters.

You can switch to clinical trials at the start of a workflow (from the homepage search window) by selecting the source as either "Research papers" or "Clinical trials" in the source drop down menu, available in Reports, Systematic Reviews, and Find Papers.

Once you've selected clinical trials as your corpus, click the Filters button to access these options:

Results Required — Show only trials that have published results on ClinicalTrials.gov. Useful when you need completed studies with available outcomes data.

Phase — Filter by trial phase:

• NA — Not applicable (no traditional phase classification)

• Early Phase 1 — Very early safety studies

• Phase 1 — Initial safety and dosage studies

• Phase 2 — Efficacy and side effects studies

• Phase 3 — Large-scale effectiveness comparisons

• Phase 4 — Post-market surveillance studies

Recruitment Status — Filter by where the trial stands:

• Recruiting — Currently accepting participants

• Active, not recruiting — Study ongoing but closed to new participants

• Completed — Study has ended normally

• Not yet recruiting — Study registered but not yet open

• Enrolling by invitation — Participants recruited by invitation only

• Suspended — Temporarily halted

• Terminated — Ended early

• Withdrawn — Withdrawn before enrollment began

• Available — Expanded access studies

Publication Date — Filter by the trial's most recent publication or update date (trials can be updated multiple times, so this reflects the latest version).

• Data source: Clinical trials data comes from ClinicalTrials.gov, which is primarily US-focused. International trials may be underrepresented unless they're also registered there.

• Search scope: Clinical trial search looks at protocol and registration information, not full-text results papers.

• Results availability: The "Results Required" filter only catches results posted to ClinicalTrials.gov. Completed trials may have published journal results that aren't linked to the registry entry.

When running a Systematic Review, you can add multiple search tabs to include papers from both Clinical Trials and the Research Papers corpus.