Chat with Papers

Edited

The Chat with Papers feature helps you get to the heart of your research questions quickly, just as if you were chatting with the author(s) of the paper(s)! It's a powerful tool that uses natural language to generate insights from a single paper or a diverse body of papers. Chat with up to 8 papers at a time with a paid Elicit subscription or 4 papers at a time as a free user.

Chat enables you to:

  • Compare and contrast papers

  • Summarize multiple papers along specific dimensions (like their methodologies)

  • Cluster papers by a certain topic

  • Ask clarifying questions about a single paper or topics discussed in multiple papers

  • Critique papers

  • and more!

How to Chat with Papers

To chat with papers, first create a Notebook using either Find Papers or Extract Data from PDFs. Chat needs at least one paper available in the Notebook to be enabled as a step.

Select the paper(s) you'd like to chat with, click add a new step, and choose Chat with papers.

Enter your question or prompt into the chat box along with any instructions you'd like to give about how to structure the reply.

Based on the results, you can keep chatting to ask more questions or dig deeper into a topic. You can also add additional steps to your Notebook as needed. Your chat step will be saved for you to review at any time.

Tips to get the most out of Chat with Papers

  1. Chat with papers from a single step or chat with papers from multiple steps in your Notebook. For example, you might start your Notebook with the Extract Data from PDFs step to import papers you already have. Next, add a Find Papers step to discover new papers. Then select papers from both steps and chat with them.

  2. Give the chat instructions to structure its replies. Sometimes chat can be a little too chatty. Prompt it to organize its reply in bullet points, limit itself to a specific word count, or structure its response in another way that's helpful to you. This will help keep the chat responses manageable and focused for you.

  3. Toggle use full text on or off as needed. Chat can utilize the full text of your papers, if it's available, or you can limit it to just the paper abstracts, which will be faster.