Getting started with Elicit

On Elicit's home page, you'll find five different options for starting your research: Find papers, Get a research report, Start a systematic review, Extract data from PDFs, and List of concepts. 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 find 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 search results, check out the resources below:

• Improve Find Papers Search Results

• Filter by Year of Publication

• Filter by Column

• Improve Column Results

Currently, this beta feature is only available to Elicit Pro and Team subscribers.

With Reports, you can enter your research question, and Elicit will automatically generate a detailed report to answer your question that you can export 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 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 and Team 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.

Extract Data from PDFs is great if you already have papers in PDF format and you'd like to generate a table with those papers to work with those papers. Once you've included the papers in the table, you can use Elicit's columns to extract data, summarize, or chat with those papers.

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.

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.

Extract Data from PDFs is subject to your plan's data extraction allowance.

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

• Using Elicit for Literature Review or Systematic Reviews with Elicit

• Uploading Papers in Bulk

• Import Papers from Zotero

• Create Custom Columns

In Elicit, a "concept" includes things like effects, techniques, datasets, arguments, or examples of any topic that you'd like to explore. Use the List of Concepts step when you'd like to identify common concepts discussed across the topic's literature.

For example, you might ask it to return a list of effects of invasive species:

Elicit will first find papers relevant to that topic. Then it will analyze those papers to find common concepts the papers discuss. Next, it will remove any duplicates that it finds before displaying a final table of the concepts it found.

The table will display the various concepts that Elicit found and the papers in which they were discussed so that you can explore those concepts further.

In some cases, you will see "Language model" in the right column instead of a paper. This means that we asked a language model to provide a list of concepts on this topic. This was one of the concepts it provided, but Elicit was unable to verify it in any of the papers found. Elicit still includes the concept in case it's valid and useful for you, but we flag it so that you can double check that it's correct for yourself.

When using the Find Papers, Extract Data from PDFs, or List of Concepts options, you can further your research by adding additional steps within the same Notebook.

In addition to the three primary steps, 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 Extract Data from PDFs 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.

Or you might start with a List of Concepts to generate ideas for where you'd like to go in your research. Then you can add a step to find papers about one of the concepts returned before chatting with those papers to get a better understanding of the concept.