Elicit is an AI research assistant from Elicit Research, PBC that answers questions by searching, summarizing, and extracting data from a corpus of more than 138 million academic papers, with every AI-generated claim backed by a sentence-level citation to the underlying study. It's built for researchers, students, and anyone who needs literature-grounded answers rather than a general AI summary.
What it is
Elicit searches across its corpus of academic papers to answer research questions, summarizing findings and extracting structured data from the underlying studies rather than generating an answer from general training knowledge alone. Its paper corpus is drawn from Semantic Scholar, PubMed, and OpenAlex, combined and deduplicated by Elicit into a single database of about 138 million papers.
How it answers and cites sources
Elicit 'supports all AI-generated claims with sentence-level citations from the underlying sources,' so every statement in an answer can be traced back to the specific paper — and the specific sentence — it came from. That makes it possible to check a claim against the original research rather than trusting the AI summary at face value.
Pricing and access
Elicit is freemium. The Basic plan is free and includes unlimited search across more than 138 million papers, aimed at casual exploration. The Pro plan costs $49 per user per month, billed as $588 annually, and adds features including API access; higher tiers include unlimited API access for programmatic use. Exact feature differences beyond search and API access aren't detailed in the sources reviewed here, so check Elicit's current pricing page for the full comparison.
Privacy and data use
Elicit has stated that it 'explicitly does not train on Enterprise user data, and has agreements with third-party providers (like OpenAI) that prevent them from doing so either,' as part of its SOC 2 compliance work. The sources reviewed do not include a dedicated privacy-policy or GDPR/EU-hosting attribute for Elicit's Basic and Pro tiers specifically, so anyone with strict compliance requirements should confirm current data-handling terms — especially outside the Enterprise tier — directly with Elicit.
Who it's for
Elicit fits researchers, students, and professionals doing literature reviews or evidence gathering who want citation-backed answers rather than open-web AI summaries, and its free Basic plan makes that available to casual users with unlimited search across its full paper corpus. Because it does not search the live web — only its academic paper database — and Pro pricing starts at $49/user/month, it's best suited to serious research work rather than general-purpose search.