Systematic Reviews in Elicit

Systematic Reviews are currently available on Pro, Teams, and Enterprise plans. Each Systematic Review you start counts as 1 workflow toward your plan's workflow limit.

With AI and language models, Elicit can help you save up to 80% of the time on a systematic review without sacrificing accuracy. The Systematic Reviews workflow provides step-by-step guidance through search, screening, and data extraction, culminating in a research report summarizing the relevant papers.

Elicit supports the major steps of a systematic review:

1. Set up your review on the Protocol Page

2. Gather all papers for the systematic review

3. Screen papers by title and abstract

4. (Optionally) Screen papers by full text

5. Extract data from screened-in papers

6. Generate a research report

When you start a new systematic review, the first thing you'll see is the Protocol Page. This page shows every step and setting in one place, so you can configure your review before anything runs.

Enter your research question at the top. Elicit uses this to generate search strategies, screening criteria suggestions, extraction column suggestions, and to guide the research report. You can update it at any time.

Use this free-text field to describe your eligibility criteria, PICO framework, or other protocol parameters. For example:

• Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome definitions

• Inclusion and exclusion criteria

• Study design requirements (e.g., "RCTs only" or "exclude case reports")

This gives Elicit additional context to apply throughout your review.

The Protocol Page displays every stage of your review as a visual timeline. Some stages are always included, and others can be toggled on or off:

Always on:

• Gather — search for and collect papers

• Extraction — extract data from included papers

• Report — generate a research report

Toggleable:

• Abstract screening — screen papers by title and abstract. Turn this off if you want all gathered papers to go directly to extraction.

• Full-text screening — an additional screening step using the full paper text. Only available when abstract screening is enabled. Useful when your eligibility criteria require details not found in abstracts.

Disabling abstract screening will also disable full-text screening.

Choose how Elicit gathers papers:

• Semantic search — Elicit interprets your question and finds conceptually relevant papers. Best for exploratory reviews.

• Keyword search — use Boolean strings (AND, OR, NOT) for precise, reproducible searches. Best for PRISMA-compliant reviews or HTA filings.

Note: you can add additional search options once on the Paper Sources step.

• Strict screening — when enabled, papers that fail any strict criterion are automatically excluded. Useful for hard requirements like study type or date range.

• Figure extraction — allow Elicit to analyze figures and images in papers during screening and extraction. Available on Teams and Enterprise plans.

• Report template — select the structure and format of your final research report.

You are not locked into your initial settings. Click Protocol in the sidebar at any point to reopen the Protocol Page and make changes.

• Changes apply to stages that haven't completed yet.

• If you enable a stage that runs before your current stage (e.g., turning on full-text screening while you're in extraction), you will be taken back to that earlier stage.

• If you disable a stage that has already run, its effects are removed from downstream stages. The results are saved, so this is reversible — re-enable the stage and they come back.

The Gather step consolidates papers into a single systematic review. You choose an initial search strategy on the Protocol Page, but you can add more searches, delete tabs, or change your approach within the Gather stage itself.

• Multi-Tab Search: Open multiple search tabs using the + icon. Combine broad semantic questions with precise Boolean queries simultaneously.

• Iterate & Refine: Test different search strategy variations. Elicit automatically de-duplicates papers across active search tabs.

• Uploads: Upload PDFs directly or select papers from your Elicit Library.

Once you've gathered all relevant papers, click "Define screening" to continue.

The screening phase refines your criteria using a sample of papers. Title and abstract screening runs first, followed by full-text screening if you enabled it on the Protocol Page.

Defining criteria:

• Elicit auto-generates screening criteria based on your research question and protocol details

• You can edit, disable, or manually add criteria

• Mark individual criteria as strict to automatically exclude papers that fail them

Evaluating results:

• Click Evaluate screening when you're satisfied with your criteria

• Papers failing strict criteria appear at the bottom of results

• Other papers sort by likelihood of meeting all criteria, with screening scores visible

• To override a screening decision on a specific paper, click on that paper and then click Override in the right hand sidebar.

Threshold adjustment:

Once screening has completed, increase or decrease the screening threshold to include or exclude more papers. Higher thresholds are more selective. When you've finished screening, click "Define extraction" to continue.

You'll first define extraction columns on a subset of papers to make sure your columns are functioning as you desire. Elicit generates suggested data extraction columns based on your research question. You can edit these suggestions, remove them, or add your own columns.

Click "Run extraction" when you're satisfied with your column definitions.

Click on any cell in the finished data extraction table to view supporting quotes from the paper so that you can easily check the AI-generated answers for accuracy.

The final step generates a research report summarizing your review. When more than 80 papers are screened in, the 80 papers with the highest screening scores are included in the report.

If you selected a report template on the Protocol Page, the report will follow that structure.

• Browser Extension: Use your institutional database access to pull full texts before data extraction.

• CSV Export: Export results from any step for further cleaning or analysis.

• Collaboration: Team and Enterprise plans enable real-time collaborative editing. View-only shareable links are available on all plans.