On Elicit's home page you'll find three ways to start: a Research Agent session, a Research Report, or a Systematic Review. Which one you choose depends on how much structure your question needs and what outputs you want. Most research starts in the Agent. Reports are designed for a quick overview of a topic space. Systematic Reviews are best when you need full control and specific structured outputs.

Note: All Elicit workflows are subject to the usage limit for your plan.

Available on all plans. Agent sessions let you tackle research questions with highly flexible outputs. The agent has access to Elicit's full corpus of 138 million academic papers as well as the larger web, and each session takes up to 20 uploaded resources (PDFs, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, JPG and many other formats).

Agent sessions can generate reports, summaries, tables, slides, figures, and more based on the research questions you ask. Just tell it what you want and then iterate and refine with it until it fits your needs. One session can go from finding papers, to extracting data from the results, to investigating a single study, to synthesizing the evidence, without switching tools.

Customers on Scale or Enterprise plans can work in agent sessions together to collaborate on research projects. Learn more: Collaborate in a shared Research Agent session.

For what the agent can reach, how to scope it to your own saved papers, and how to set its effort level, see Elicit's Research Agent. To have the agent do recurring work on a schedule, see Routines in Elicit. For available predefined agent skills and how to build your own, see Skills in Elicit.

Available on all plans. Enter your research question and Elicit generates a detailed report to answer it, with references to the papers it used. Reports export in PDF or Word format.

Reports are great for getting a quick, detailed understanding of a topic, and as a jumping off point for more detailed research. Learn more here: Research Reports.

Available to Pro, Scale, and Enterprise subscribers.

Elicit's Systematic Review workflow takes you through a guided, step by step process, gathering papers from uploads and from Elicit's search, screening them for inclusion or exclusion, extracting data from the papers that make it through, and generating a PRISMA style report at the end.

Choose a Systematic Review when you need a high degree of rigorous control over paper search, screening criteria, and data extraction points. See Systematic Reviews in Elicit for the full workflow options.

Find Papers, Extract Data, and Chat with Papers became part of the Research Agent on 30 September 2026. Find Papers and Extract Data are skills the Agent runs, and questions about specific papers are handled by uploading them to a session.

Your existing sessions are still in Recents and can be carried into a new Agent session. See Where did Find Papers, Extract Data, and Chat with Papers go? for more information.