A powerful tool for AI-assisted academic literature review

If you do academic research, especially in the sciences, you need to know about an outstanding new AI literature review tool called Elicit, which you can currently use for free. Elicit is created by the outstanding team at Ought, Inc.

The user experience in Elicit is pretty straightforward. You type your research question, and Elicit gives you a list of relevant papers, with abstract summaries for each. If you want, you can customize the abstract summaries by selecting options in the lower-left frame. You can also filter the results to get only those with a full-text PDF.

You can also interrogate a specific paper with AI assistance. Click a paper that has a full-text PDF. Type a question, and the app will not only answer your question, but will also take you to the relevant portion of the text, which it will highlight for you. This is great for citation and for verifying the AI’s response.

If the AI revolution feels overwhelming right now, it's only because it's still in its infancy. The best applications of AI will use it invisibly behind the scenes to reduce friction in familiar tasks. Elicit doesn't feel like an AI app. It feels like browsing PubMed, but with more power and less headache.