Elicit

Overview Elicit is the AI research assistant built for the actual mechanics of literature review — the part where you have to find 40 papers, read them carefully, extract specific data points from each, compare them in a table, and write a synthesis. Founded in 2019 by ex DeepMind and ex Google researcher Andreas Stuhlmüller inside Ought (a research nonprofit) and later spun into an independent company, Elicit has quietly become the professional grade tool that PhD students, systematic reviewers, and clinical researchers pay for when a chatbot answer is not enough and they need a real evidence extraction workflow. What Elicit actually does, cleanly stated, is turn a research question into a structured, exportable data extraction across dozens or hundreds of papers. You type a question — "what interventions have been studied for reducing hospital readmissions after congestive heart failure" — and Elicit returns a list of relevant papers with the abstract, the study design, the intervention, the population, the outcome, the effect size, and any other columns you ask for, all extracted into a table you can filter, export, and cite. It is not a general research chatbot. It is a systematic review style workflow accelerator, and it does that job better than any generalist tool on the market. The one line positioning: Elicit is the tool researchers use when the deliverable is a literature review, a systematic review, or a research protocol — not a chat answer. If your day includes phrases like "extract intervention type and…