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.
1. Natural language filters (Find Papers)
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"
2. The Filter button (Find Papers and Systematic Reviews)
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.
Find Papers:
Systematic Reviews:
Publication year
Set a date range to restrict results to papers published within a specific window. You can set a start year, end year, or both.
Journal quality
Use the Journal quality slider to restrict results to papers from higher-ranked journals. Rankings are based on the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).
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
Study Type
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.
Abstract Keywords
Set keywords that the abstract contains or does not contain. If you add more than one keyword, the keywords are treated as AND — the abstract must contain all keywords listed to be included.
4. Filtering clinical trials
Elicit can search clinical trial registrations in addition to research papers. Clinical trials have their own set of filters.
Switching to clinical trials search
You can switch to clinical trials at the start of a workflow 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.
Clinical trials filters
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.
Phase — Filter by trial phase: NA, Early Phase 1, Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, or Phase 4.
Recruitment Status — Filter by where the trial stands: Recruiting, Active (not recruiting), Completed, Not yet recruiting, Enrolling by invitation, Suspended, Terminated, Withdrawn, or Available.
Publication Date — Filter by the trial's most recent publication or update date.
Limitations to be aware of
Data source: Clinical trials data comes from ClinicalTrials.gov, which is primarily US-focused. International trials may be underrepresented.
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.
When running a Systematic Review, you can add multiple search tabs to include papers from both Clinical Trials and the Research Papers corpus.