How to use Elicit for literature reviews and extend its capabilities

Literature reviews can be brutal. You're drowning in papers, manually extracting data into spreadsheets, and spending weeks on what should take days. Elicit AI delivers a powerful solution for literature reviews with AI assistant that's helped many researchers.

How to use Elicit AI research assistant for literature reviews?

Elicit AI research assistant helps with literature reviews by allowing users search through 125+ million academic papers using semantic understanding rather than basic keyword matching. Instead of hunting for exact terms, it grasps the meaning behind your research questions and finds relevant studies even when they use different terminology.

The platform excels at empirical research—studies with concrete data, experiments, and measurable results. For biomedicine, machine learning, social sciences, and any field with quantitative outcomes, Elicit delivers impressive results with 94-99% accuracy in data extraction.

For researchers whose work extends beyond academic papers—requiring industry reports, regulatory documents, or multi-database searches, AI for literature review like Anara's agent mode can complement Elicit's academic strengths. But let's first master what Elicit does well.

How to use Elicit to write a literature review?

You can use Elicit's five options depending on your research stage:

• Find Papers: Unlimited searches for discovering relevant literature
• Research Report: Automatically generated comprehensive reports
• Systematic Review: Step-by-step guided systematic review workflow (Pro/Team only)
• Upload and Extract: Analyze your own PDF collections
• Summarize Concepts: Identify common themes across literature

Using Elicit for literature reviews: step-by-step guide

1. Set up your search strategy

Create your free account at elicit.com. The streamlined registration gets you working immediately.

Start with "Find Papers" and formulate your research question in natural language. Don't think keywords; think complete questions. Instead of "social media mental health," write "What are the effects of social media use on adolescent mental health outcomes?"

2. Execute your initial search

Enter your question and review the 8 most relevant papers Elicit returns. Each comes with AI-generated summaries and relevance rankings that provide an excellent landscape view of your research area.

Load additional papers beyond the initial results. Apply filters for publication dates, study types, and citation counts to refine your scope with precision.

If your research requires sources beyond academic papers—industry reports, grey literature, regulatory documents, or even handwritten notes, see Elicit alternatives that fill the gap.

3. Extract and organize data

Add custom columns to extract specific information:

• Study methodology and sample sizes
• Key findings and effect sizes
• Population characteristics
• Intervention details
• Limitations

Star relevant papers and create extraction tables. Elicit provides supporting quotes and explanations for every data point, ensuring transparency and enabling thorough verification.

4. Advanced systematic review workflow

For rigorous systematic reviews, Elicit's Pro-level workflow delivers exceptional sophistication:

• Research question refinement: Elicit suggests ways to clarify your question and explore additional angles.
• Intelligent paper gathering: Upload PDFs, import from your library, or use Elicit's semantic search to automatically add up to 500 relevant papers as supplements to traditional searches.
• AI-powered screening: Elicit automatically generates screening criteria based on your research question, then sorts papers by likelihood of meeting all criteria. You can review detailed screening recommendations and manually override any decisions.
• Systematic data extraction: AI generates extraction field suggestions that you can edit or override. Every extraction includes supporting quotes from the original papers plus explanations for verification.
• Collaborative features: Team and Enterprise plans enable real-time collaborative editing, so multiple researchers can work on reviews simultaneously.
• Living reviews: Update your reviews easily as new papers are published, keeping your research current.

Related: Real-life example of conducting systematic literature review.

5. Synthesize and export

Use additional research steps to create summary tables, chat with specific papers for clarification, or summarize abstracts from selected studies. Export findings to CSV, BibTeX, or RIS formats for seamless integration with reference managers.

Elicit's sweet spot

Elicit excels at what it's designed for: academic paper discovery, empirical data extraction, and systematic review automation. It claims to save researchers up to 5 hours per week and reduce systematic review time by 80% without compromising accuracy.

The platform performs brilliantly for:

• Academic literature processing: Outstanding semantic search across 125+ million papers from Semantic Scholar
• Systematic review automation: Sophisticated screening, extraction, and synthesis workflows with high accuracy
• Collaborative research: Real-time editing and sharing capabilities for research teams
• Data verification: Supporting quotes and explanations for all AI-generated extractions
• Reproducible research: Standardized workflows that can be updated and shared

What if Elicit isn't enough for lit review?

Elicit handles academic literature reviews well, but you'll hit clear walls in these situations:

• When you need multi-source research - Elicit searches academic papers from Semantic Scholar. Anara's @Research agent synthesizes insights from academic databases (PubMed, arXiv, JSTOR), web sources (@Search Web), and multimedia content simultaneously—providing comprehensive analysis when your research requires diverse content types beyond academic papers.
• When you need extended research execution - Elicit extracts data into tables. Anara's @Complete Form agent takes your systematic review templates and automatically processes entire literature collections, handling complex multi-step data extraction that would overwhelm Elicit's structured approach.
• When you need advanced source verification- Elicit provides supporting quotes in extraction tables. Anara's chunk highlighting links every AI insight to exact passages in source documents with clickable verification, enabling instant accuracy checking across multi-source synthesis that Elicit's table format cannot provide.
• When you need robust team collaboration Elicit offers basic sharing and real-time editing. Anara provides comprehensive team features including chat recovery, resumable streaming across devices, granular library permissions, and session management—essential tools for complex collaborative research projects.
• When you need comprehensive research workflow automation - Elicit focuses on discovery and extraction. Anara's agent ecosystem handles the complete research lifecycle: @SearchPapers for discovery, @CompleteForm for systematic extraction, @Research for synthesis, @CreateCitation for references, and even @CreateFlashcards for study materials—automating workflows Elicit doesn't address.

Elicit AI literature reviews: key takeaways

You may use Elicit for structured academic literature discovery and table-based data extraction from its Semantic Scholar database. It excels at systematic review workflows with clear extraction templates and paper screening.

Deploy Anara's agent ecosystem when you need comprehensive research automation. It can support your research workflows from discovery through publication by providing similar database access to Elicit and synthesis across multiple sources while handling complex templates.

Most researchers find Anara's multi-source discovery and synthesis capabilities sufficient for their literature review needs. Add Elicit if you need its Semantic Scholar specialization or prefer its table-based extraction interface over Anara's agent-powered workflows.