Your Library holds the papers you have collected in Elicit, and opens at any time from the left sidebar. Every PDF you upload is saved there, along with any papers you save out of a Research Agent session. Collections your colleagues have shared with you appear there too.
Visit the Library to:
Delete papers from your library if you'd no longer like to use that paper with Elicit
Tag papers to organize them and make them easier to locate for use in your workflows.
Group papers into collections, share a collection with your team, and start a review or extraction from one.
Your Library as research context
The Research Agent works from the papers you have already collected. When a question calls for scholarly sources, it searches your Library and the collections you have access to, including collections shared with you, before reaching for the wider literature.
The agent tells you when it has used your saved papers, and separates sources it found in your Library from sources it found through a broader search, so it stays clear which evidence came from where.
Pointing the agent at a specific paper. Refer to a saved paper by title, author, DOI, PMID, uploaded filename, or the collection it sits in, and the agent will find it. If more than one paper could be the one you mean, it asks which rather than guessing.
Controlling what it searches. Scope a session to one or more collections ("only use our NSCLC collection"), ask for a broader search of the literature, or tell the agent to leave your Library out entirely.
Saving papers from a Research Agent session
When the Research Agent finds papers worth keeping, save them to your Library without leaving the session. Ask the agent to save the papers it found, and they are added to your Library like any other paper, ready to use in a Systematic Review, an extraction, or a later search.
Tell the agent where to put them:
Into an existing collection. Name the collection you want and the agent saves the papers straight into it.
Into a new collection. Ask for a collection that does not exist yet and the agent creates it, then adds the papers.
Without naming a collection. The papers go to your Library, and the agent offers your existing collections as destinations.
The agent confirms what it saved and where it went, and checks the papers against the Library you already have so you do not end up with duplicates. Inside a Project that has a linked collection, saved papers go to that collection by default.
Elicit fetches metadata and full text for the saved papers in the background. They appear in your Library straight away, so a paper may show limited details for a short time until that finishes.
To share a saved collection with colleagues or attach one to a Project, see Organize Your Papers with Collections. To scope an agent session to particular sources, or for what else the agent can be asked to produce, see Elicit's Research Agent.
Who can see your papers
PDFs you upload are private to your Elicit account. They are not shared with other Elicit users and they are not added to Elicit's paper corpus.
Sharing a collection is the one thing that changes this, and only for the papers in that collection: the people you share it with can read those papers, and editors can add and remove papers. The rest of your Library stays private. See Share a collection.
Some PDFs may encounter an error when uploading. Troubleshoot common upload errors here: Errors When Uploading PDFs