EElicit

Elicit searches more than 138 million academic papers and 545,000 clinical trials. Its Research Agent, formally launched on August 5, 2026, plans and runs multi-step research on its own and returns a report in which every claim is cited.

Elicit is run by Elicit Research, a public benefit corporation in Oakland, California, and says more than 5 million researchers have used it. It raised a $22 million Series A led by Spark Capital and Footwork in February 2025.

How It Works

A user describes a question, and the Research Agent decides which sources to search, from Semantic Scholar, PubMed, OpenAlex and ClinicalTrials.gov to patents, regulatory and biology databases, web pages and uploaded documents. It then extracts findings and produces reports with tables, figures, analyses and even slides. Routines, added in September 2026, rerun an agent task daily or weekly and report what changed.

For formal evidence work, the Systematic Review workflow screens papers against inclusion criteria and extracts data, with support for PRISMA 2020 guidelines and recorded exclusion reasons. Teams can share a Library of papers that the agent searches, and Elicit exposes search, reports and systematic reviews through an API and an MCP server for tools like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.

Pricing

The free Basic plan offers unlimited paper search, summaries and chat with full-text papers, plus limited agent and report runs. Pro costs $49 per user a month billed annually, or $75 monthly, and adds systematic reviews of up to 5,000 papers, Routines, custom extractions and API access. Scale gives five times Pro’s usage plus an admin panel and real-time collaboration. Enterprise is custom, screens up to 40,000 papers and does not train on customer data by default. Academic plans cost less, and all plans draw on a monthly usage pool that does not roll over.

What to Watch Out For

Elicit is designed for English, and quality in other languages varies. Heavy agent use can exhaust the usage pool before month end. Reports and screening decisions are fast but should be checked by someone who knows the field, particularly for regulatory or clinical work. Third-party trackers reported price increases in October 2026, so confirm rates at checkout.

Recent News

Elicit’s product changelog records an upgraded API and MCP on July 15, 2026, the Research Agent launch on August 5, a shared research Library on September 17 and scheduled Routines on September 30.