Getting started with Elicit: Which workflow option should I use?

On Elicit's home page, you'll find several different options to start your research: Find Papers, Research Report, Systematic Review, Upload and Extract, Chat with Papers, and Create an Alert. Which one you choose depends on what stage of your research you're in, how granularly you want to control and interact with the results, and what output you're looking for Elicit to provide. The guide below will walk through each of the options, so you can choose the best place to start.

Find Papers searches are unlimited on all of Elicit's plans. We recommend starting here in order to familiarize yourself with how Elicit works as well as experience Elicit's tables, columns, filters, chat, and other features.

The Find Papers search box allows you to ask a research question to search papers and journal articles related to that question. With Elicit's semantic search engine, you can ask a question in natural language, and Elicit will find relevant papers, without you having to think of every possible keyword to search for. Just enter your research question, and start finding the most relevant papers.

Find Papers searches over our corpus of more than 125 million papers from Semantic Scholar, both open access and closed access.

Elicit will return a summary of the 8 most relevant papers it found on your topic and a table containing the papers.

From there, you can add columns to the table from our column library on the right to analyze the papers further, create your own custom columns, filter your results, load more papers, search across citation trails, or add additional steps to continue your research at the bottom of the table.

For tips on improving your Find Papers results, check out the resources below:

• Improve Find Papers Results

• Filter by Year of Publication

• Filter by Column

• Improve Column Results

With Reports, you can enter your research question, and Elicit will automatically generate a detailed report to answer your question. You can export reports in PDF format. The report will include references to the papers that Elicit found and used to generate that report.

Reports are great for getting a quick, detailed understanding on your research topic and as a jumping off point for conducting more detailed research. Learn more about generating research reports here: Research Reports

Research reports are subject to your plan's data extraction allowance. Also be sure to check out our guide for using Elicit's content in your own work: Citing Elicit

Currently available to Pro, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.

Elicit's Systematic Review workflow takes you through a guided, step by step process for creating a thorough systematic review on your research topic. It starts by helping you refine your research question:

From there, it will walk you through including both PDFs that you can upload to Elicit and using Elicit's search to find additional papers, screening papers for inclusion or exclusion, extracting data from those papers, and generating a report at the end of the process.

The Systematic Review option is great for researchers who need a high degree of control over which papers are included as well as how and what data is extracted from those papers. Learn more here: Start a systematic review

Systematic Reviews are subject to your plan's data extraction allowance.

Upload and Extract is great if you already have papers in PDF format and you'd like to generate a table with those papers to work with them. Simply upload your PDF files or select files you've already added to your library that you'd like to include in this table, then click the arrow button at the bottom of the paper selection modal.

Elicit will create a table with those papers, which you can then use to review, summarize, or dig deeper into your topic by adding columns or additional steps, including chatting with those papers.

Upload and Extract is subject to your plan's data extraction allowance.

For tips on extracting data from PDFs, see the articles below:

• Running Upload and Extract in Batches

• Uploading Papers in Bulk

• Import Papers from Zotero

• Create Custom Columns

The Chat with Papers option allows you to upload PDFs or select papers you've already uploaded to your Elicit library so that you can chat with them. Just select the papers you'd like to chat with, up to 4 on the Basic plan or 8 on any of Elicit's paid plans, and click the arrow button at the bottom of the paper selection modal.

Elicit will then provide you with a chat prompt so you can begin chatting with the papers you selected:

Learn more here: Chat with Papers

When using the Find Papers, Upload and Extract, or Chat with Papers options, you can further your research by adding additional steps within the same Notebook.

In addition to the primary Notebook options, you also have options to:

• Select specific papers from your table (or multiple tables in the same Notebook) to create a new table with just those papers--Using this option will not count against your paper extraction allowance.

• Summarize the abstracts of specific papers you select

• Chat with papers you select

These additional steps allow you to narrow or broaden your results and extract more meaningful data. You can add as many additional steps as you'd like as your research takes you in new directions or uncovers interesting new insights.

For example, you might start with the Upload and Extract step to bring in papers you already have. Then you could add a Find Papers step to discover more papers on your topic. You can then select the most relevant papers from both steps to combine into a single table so you can add columns to extract data, chat with those papers, or summarize the abstracts of those papers.

Currently available to Pro, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.

When you create an alert in Elicit, the system will regularly check for new papers on your topic and send you an email about new papers that it finds.

Click Create Alert at the right, enter your research question, and apply any filters to hone in on your topic. Then, click Apply at the bottom.

Learn more about Alerts here: Elicit Alerts