Hi there,

Users often ask us how Elicit searches for papers when you generate an Elicit Report or use Find Papers. Today, I’d like to answer some of those questions.

How does it work?

Elicit uses semantic search, meaning we search for papers based on the intent of your query rather than keywords. In general, this means we'll uncover papers you'd otherwise miss when keyword searching in PubMed or Google Scholar.

What is the difference between searching for papers in Elicit Systematic Review and Reports vs. Find Papers?

Systematic Review/Reports give you up to 500 results and explain whether each search result is relevant to your query, but may take several minutes to run. Find Papers will return up to 8 relevant papers with a summary in seconds. 

The results at the Screening step in Systematic Review/Reports look like:

The results of Find Papers look like:

We recommend you use Find Papers to quickly find relevant papers, and Systematic Review/Reports to find far more papers and get a comprehensive research overview.

Where does Elicit search for papers?

Elicit searches over 126 million academic papers from the Semantic Scholar corpus across all academic disciplines, including from journals like PubMed, JAMA, BMJ, Nature, Science, and more.

Can I view PDFs in Elicit?

Yes, when Elicit has the PDF. To view a PDF, click the title of the paper.

Is Elicit search a full replacement for systematic review database search?

No. We recommend using Elicit as a supplement to traditional database search in systematic reviews. Because Elicit uses semantic search instead of keyword search, it will often uncover papers you might otherwise miss.

Is Elicit restricted to open-access papers only?

No, it also includes non-open-access papers. When you add columns in Elicit, Elicit will answer based on the full text of the paper if it is available via open access; otherwise Elicit will answer based on the abstract alone.

Let us know if you have any more questions!