Elicit

Elicit is one of the more genuinely useful AI tools for knowledge work because it's narrow and honest about what it does: you ask a research question, and it returns a table of relevant papers with the details you'd otherwise dig out by hand — methods, sample sizes, outcomes — drawn from a corpus of 125M+ papers and ranked by relevance. For the first, most tedious pass of a literature review, that's a real time-saver, and because it cites and links the source papers, you can trace every claim back rather than trusting a summary. The free tier covers unlimited search and summaries; paid plans ($12/month Plus, $49/month Pro) buy volume on PDF data extraction. The caveat that matters: automated extraction isn't infallible — it can misread a table or miss nuance — so anything you intend to cite must be checked against the original, and coverage is strongest in empirical and biomedical fields, thinner in the humanities. Treated as a fast, well-organized research assistant rather than an authority, it earns its place in a serious researcher's workflow and meaningfully cuts the grind of evidence-gathering.