Unleashing the Power of Elicit - An AI-powered research assistant.

In an era where information is abundant, sifting through scientific literature can be a daunting task. Enter Elicit - an AI-powered research assistant designed to streamline this process and make your research journey smoother. This blog post will guide you on how to harness the full potential of Elicit in exploring scientific literature.

In this post, we’ll cover:

1. Introduction to Elicit
2. Understanding the Features of Elicit
3. How to Use Elicit for Literature Review
4. Evaluating the Accuracy of Information Provided by Elicit
5. Advantages and Limitations of Using Elicit
6. Practical Tips for Maximizing Your Use of Elicit
7. The Future of Research with AI Tools Like Elicit

Stay tuned as we delve into these topics and provide actionable insights on how you can effectively use this innovative tool in your research process!

Introduction to Elicit

Elicit is an AI-powered research assistant developed by startup company Ought in collaboration with the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. It utilizes advanced natural language processing capabilities to help researchers quickly discover relevant papers, extract key information, and summarize evidence on a topic of interest.

Elicit aims to automate and expedite time-consuming literature review tasks that are a critical part of the research process. It does this by searching databases like Semantic Scholar to identify top papers related to the research question entered by the user.

Understanding the Features of Elicit

Some of the key features and capabilities of Elicit include:

• Paper Discovery - Elicit can locate relevant papers on a topic even without perfect keyword matching. This allows it to surface papers a regular search may miss.
• Information Extraction - The tool can analyze papers and extract important details like the abstract, interventions tested, outcomes measured, number of participants etc. This data can be exported into a spreadsheet.
• Evidence Summarization - Elicit summarizes the key takeaways and evidence from the top papers related to the research question. This allows rapid analysis of the existing literature.
• Additional Metadata - Useful context like number of citations, journal impact factor, funding sources etc. are provided for each paper. This assists in determining paper quality and influence.
• Citations List - Elicit also identifies and lists other relevant papers that cite the studies discovered, helping users expand their literature search.

How to Use Elicit for Literature Review

Here are some tips on how researchers can effectively use Elicit for literature reviews:

• Frame your research question clearly and precisely before entering it into Elicit. Use a format like “What is the effect of X on Y?”.
• Go through the summarized evidence and list of papers returned by Elicit. Star or save the most relevant ones for further analysis.
• Export the citations data into a CSV file or reference manager to consolidate all extracted info.
• Review the full text of shortlisted papers. Verify the accuracy of the information extracted by Elicit.
• Use Elicit’s features like “Suggest search terms” and “Brainstorm questions” to refine your search and discover additional papers.
• Run Elicit repeatedly as you develop more nuanced questions related to your research topic.

Evaluating the Accuracy of Information Provided by Elicit

Since Elicit relies on AI for extraction and summarization, it is important to evaluate the accuracy of the information it provides:

• Cross-verify details like study methodology, interventions and outcomes measured against the original paper.
• Watch out for erroneous or exaggerated claims not stated in the paper’s text.
• Check if important study limitations or caveats are missed in the summaries.
• Review the full context of excerpted sentences or statistics in the paper.
• Be wary of conclusions or inferences drawn by Elicit that cannot be verified.
• Consider using Elicit’s outputs as a starting point but not definitive summaries.

Advantages and Limitations of Using Elicit

Some key pros and cons of using Elicit for literature review:

Advantages

• Saves significant researcher time and effort in paper discovery and extraction of information.
• Allows rapid analysis of evidence from multiple papers.
• Helps avoid bias by surfacing papers the researcher may have missed.
• Easy to use interface and integration with reference managers.

Limitations

• AI accuracy and comprehensiveness not perfect. Outputs need verification.
• Limited to papers in Semantic Scholar database.
• Does not replace need for full understanding of papers.
• Not optimized for certain types of qualitative research questions.
• Requires clarification of research question for best results.

Practical Tips for Maximizing Your Use of Elicit

Here are some practical tips to optimize your usage of Elicit:

• Use Elicit in combination with other literature databases for comprehensive search.
• Develop a search strategy - run Elicit multiple times with iterations on your question.
• Export and organize Elicit citations data for ease of access and analysis.
• Verify accuracy of summarized information against original papers.
• Leverage Elicit’s AI for faster paper discovery but read full texts yourself.
• Provide feedback to Elicit on errors or limitations you encounter.

The Future of Research with AI Tools Like Elicit

Elicit represents an early prototype of how AI can assist and augment (but not replace) human researchers. As the technology improves, we can expect better accuracy, interpretability and contextual awareness from tools like Elicit.

With responsible development, thoughtful application and human supervision, AI has immense potential to enhance the scientific research process. But human intelligence, critical thinking and domain expertise will remain indispensable. Exciting times lie ahead at the intersection of AI and research!

References

1. https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/elicit-is-building-a-tool-to-automate-scientific-literature-review/
2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/exploring-features-functions-elicit-ai-research-assistant-parker/
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10089336/
4. https://oakland.libguides.com/searching/elicit
5. https://connect.oeglobal.org/t/eliciting-effectiveness-of-elicit-ai-research-lit-review-tool/4191