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NakodaAI

Elicit (Ought PBC)

Elicit

An AI research assistant that reads scientific literature and shows its citations.

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  • Research
  • Education

What it does

An AI research assistant that searches over 100 million academic papers, extracts and summarizes findings, and answers questions about a paper or set of papers with citations traceable to the source sentence.

The interesting part

Built by a public benefit corporation whose stated mission is 'to scale up good reasoning' — every synthesized claim links to the specific paper and passage it came from, the opposite of a chatbot summarizing literature from memory.

Who it is for

  • Graduate students and researchers doing literature reviews
  • Clinicians checking what the evidence actually says on a narrow question
  • Anyone who needs verifiable citations, not just a fluent-sounding summary

Who should not use it

  • Anyone looking for a general-purpose chatbot — Elicit is scoped to literature, not open conversation
  • Researchers in fields with little indexed academic literature to search over

A typical use case

A public-health researcher asks Elicit to find every randomized trial on a specific intervention from the last five years, and gets a table of studies with extracted sample sizes and outcomes rather than a page of search results.

Limitations

  • Coverage depends on what's indexed — grey literature and very recent preprints can be missed
  • Extracted data still needs a human check against the source before it's relied on for publication
  • Free tier limits the number of full-text analyses per month

Pricing

Free tier available; paid plans unlock higher usage and more advanced analysis — see official pricing.

Official pricing page

Privacy & data

Built by a public benefit corporation with a stated mission around good reasoning rather than ad-supported engagement; see its own privacy policy for specifics.

Integrations

  • Search across 125M+ academic papers and 545,000+ clinical trials

Alternatives

Consensus

Similar literature-search focus, built around a multi-agent 'Scholar Agent' pipeline and an MCP server.

Why Nakoda noticed it

Nakoda includes Elicit because citation-traceable research tools are rarer than they should be, given how much AI research reading has quietly become normal. Verify, don't just summarize, is a genuinely different design goal from a chatbot.

Provenance

Verified · last checked 2026-09-24

Nakoda read the product's own site directly and confirmed the facts on this page against it.

Sources checked

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