Elicit is the research tool I wish I had at the start of my degree

I am in the second year of a PhD in environmental science. Literature reviews are a massive part of the work and finding, reading and extracting useful information from dozens of papers is genuinely one of the most time-consuming parts of the job. Someone in my department pointed me to Elicit about six months ago and I use it constantly now.

The Find Papers feature works like a search engine but with AI-generated summaries layered on top. You search a topic and get a table of relevant papers with summaries and you can add custom columns to extract specific information. So for example I can add a column asking "contained human trials" and it will flag that across every paper in the results. That kind of structured extraction used to take me days.

The Extract Data from PDFs workflow is the one I use most. I upload a set of PDFs or link my Zotero library and then use a chat interface to ask questions across all of them at once. Things like "what are the common research gaps across these papers" or "which papers contradict each other on this point." It handles the synthesis so I can focus on the analysis.

There is also a List of Concepts feature that is useful when entering a new area. It extracts key concepts from a set of papers, removes duplicates and gives you descriptions you can export as CSV. One practical note: High Accuracy Mode uses more credits but is worth enabling for precise extraction work.