Elicit

As a researcher, I've spent countless hours slogging through PubMed and Google Scholar, trying to find relevant papers. Elicit has genuinely changed that. It's not just a search engine; it's a reasoning engine for research. When I ask a question like 'What are the effects of ketamine on treatment-resistant depression?', Elicit doesn't just return a list of papers. It reads them and extracts specific claims, methodologies, and outcomes. The 'Extract Data' feature is a game-changer: I can ask it to pull out sample sizes, p-values, or specific interventions from dozens of papers at once. The summaries are surprisingly accurate, though not perfect. It sometimes misses nuanced details or misinterprets statistical results. The main limitation is its reliance on a specific set of databases (mostly PubMed and a few others), so it's weaker for niche fields or non-English literature. Also, the free tier is incredibly limited—you get about 5 credits per month, and each search or extraction costs a credit. The paid plans are steep for individual researchers ($42/month for the Plus plan). Despite these flaws, for systematic reviews, literature mapping, or just getting a quick overview of a new field, Elicit is the best tool I've used. It saves me hours per week, and the ability to export data to a spreadsheet is invaluable. It's not a replacement for reading papers critically, but it's an excellent first pass.