Elicit

Elicit is built for the most time-consuming part of academic research: the initial literature sweep. You ask a research question in plain English — not a Boolean search string — and Elicit searches across 200 million papers, ranks the most relevant and returns structured summaries for each one. Each summary breaks down the study's key finding, methodology, sample size and limitations in a few sentences. What makes this genuinely useful compared to just using Google Scholar is the structured extraction: you can see at a glance whether a study used 30 participants or 3,000, whether it was a randomized trial or an observational study, and what the effect size was. That's information that would take you 10 minutes per paper to dig out manually.

Elicit is narrower than Consensus in scope but deeper in paper-level detail. Where Consensus gives you the meta-level view — what percentage of studies agree — Elicit gives you the granular breakdown of each individual paper, which is what you need when you're actually writing a systematic review or evidence synthesis. The free plan allows a limited number of searches per month. The Plus tier at $10/month removes limits and unlocks PDF upload so you can run the same extraction on papers not in Elicit's database. The main gap: it covers primarily biomedical and social science literature and can be slower to index very recent preprints.