Routines are available to Elicit Pro, Scale, and Enterprise users.

A Routine is a set of instructions that the Research Agent runs on a recurring schedule. Describe work you want done again and again, pick a schedule, and the agent carries it out and reports back. Anything the agent can do in a session it can do on a Routine: search for new evidence, assess what changed, update an artifact, or write the summary you would otherwise write by hand.

Routines replace the old Alerts feature in Elicit. An Alert told you when new papers matched a search. A Routine can act on what it finds and hand you a finished analysis. For how to convert an existing Alert to a Routine, see Elicit Alerts.

Open Routines in the left sidebar and describe the Routine in the composer. Or, if you're already in a Research Agent session, ask the agent to set up a Routine for you. For example: "Every Monday, find relevant new evidence on CAR-T therapies, update our summary with findings that change the current landscape, and tell me what changed, with links to the sources."

The agent will reply with a proposal containing the instructions it intends to follow and the schedule it suggests. Edit the fields directly, or reply in chat to revise them.

Choose whether you want the Routine to run weekly on a specific day of the weekly or every day and pick a start time. Times are in your local time zone.

Describe what you want the agent to create for you, not just the topic. For example, ask it to summarize new literature on a topic with specific search parameters, update an existing artifact or table with new data, provide weekly briefings, etc.

To keep a single delivered artifact up to date, open it and select Track artifact to set up a Routine with the artifact and its session already selected. Just choose the schedule on which the artifact should be updated.

The Routines tab lists everything you have set up, under Active, Paused, and Archived. For any Routine:

Each run lands in a Research Agent session as real work, with its sources attached. Open the session to read the output, check a citation, question a finding, or ask the agent to perform additional tasks.

Elicit emails the Routine's owner when a run completes. Choose whether you'd like an email after every run or for run failures only. Only the owner gets run emails, even when the session has been shared with others.

Each Routine run draws on your plan's monthly usage in the same way a Research Agent session does. A Routine that runs weekly uses roughly four times what one run costs, each month.

Usage will not be charged while you're setting up the Routine. Usage starts being charged on the first run and will be charged on all subsequent runs. Paused or archived Routines do not consume any usage.