Research today is being transformed by artificial intelligence. One tool leading this revolution is Elicit – an AI assistant built specifically to supercharge research productivity.
In this guide, we‘ll cover everything you need to know about Elicit AI and how researchers like yourself can integrate it into your workflow for enhanced efficiency and impact.
The Growing Need for AI in Research
Before jumping into Elicit AI‘s capabilities, let‘s reflect on the current research landscape. While critical for progress, research suffers from fundamental inefficiencies:
- Scientists spend over 60% of time on administrative tasks like literature review and data organization instead of actual research.
- 44% struggle to even identify the right papers despite rigorous searches. Relevant works often get overlooked.
- 63% find it difficult to keep up with the ever-expanding body of publications and knowledge.
This strains productivity and causes burnout. Imagine if mundane aspects were automated – you would have so much time and mental energy freed up for higher-level analysis and discovery instead!
That‘s exactly what emerging AI assistants like Elicit enable.
Introducing Elicit AI: Your Automated Research Partner
AI assistants may conjure images of reckless sci-fi robots gone rogue.
Rest assured, Elicit AI is fundamentally different. Its innovative approach combines:
- Human-in-the-loop supervision over reasoning
- Modular building blocks for customizing support to your workflow.
- Continual feedback and improvement as it learns your preferences
This allows Elicit AI to operate as your personalized research collaborator – understanding your unique objectives and adapting to provide tailored assistance while avoiding misalignment.
Let‘s explore the specifics…
How Does Elicit AI Work?
Under the hood, Elicit AI leverages the power of natural language processing models like Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT).
These pretrained models possess deep contextual and semantic understanding of language. Elicit further trains them on research papers and questions to enable nuanced comprehension.
Additionally, modular cognitive building blocks break down multifaceted workflows:
- The search module identifies contextual paper matches.
- The extraction module pulls out key details and data.
- The summarization module condenses papers.
You can combine these capabilities to create customized automations aligned with your projects.
The system architecture also enables transparency, adaptability to feedback, and oversight over reasoning – key to developing trust in AI.
Now let‘s see Elicit‘s capabilities in action…
Key Capabilities of Elicit AI
Let‘s explore some of Elicit AI‘s capabilities that can assist with different research tasks:
Finding Relevant Papers
Tired of combing through databases and still missing key papers? Elicit AI allows you to search for papers using plain language queries. It then returns results based on semantic relevance – finding papers related by context rather than just matching keywords.
This surfaces 50% more relevant papers, including obscure publications you may have otherwise missed. It saves the pain of reformulating multiple search queries before finding useful literature.
Extracting Key Claims and Data
Identifying key takeaways across long and dense papers can be exhausting. Elicit AI can read research documents and automatically highlight their central claims, conclusions, datasets and other vital details for you.
This allows you to quickly determine which parts of a paper are most relevant to read further vs. which you can skim or set aside.
Summarizing Paper Content
When you need concise overviews of research before determining what to read in-depth, have Elicit AI summarize papers for you. Unlike generic summaries, Elicit‘s are tailored around answering your specific research questions.
It‘ll consolidate background context, methods, findings and conclusions into an easy-to-digest summary perfect for quick comprehension or even sharing with colleagues.
View an example paper summary by Elicit AI
Background: Prior research has found positive impacts of nutrition on childhood development but mechanisms remain unclear.
Objective: This study analyzed longitudinal diet and development data for 1,234 children aged 6-10 years old.
Findings: Diets high in polyunsaturated fats were strongly predictive of improved executive function and memory test performance over two years.
Significance: Provides empirical evidence for essential fatty acids driving cognitive development. Supplementing child diets should be explored by policymakers.
The above summary quickly communicates context and significance tailored to a sample research question on nutrition and development, without having to parse through a likely 30-40 page paper!
Classifying Papers
With thousands of papers scattered across your computer or reference manager app, finding documents related to particular sub-topics can turn into a nightmare. Elicit AI can automatically classify papers based on their themes, methods, topics and other attributes.
This makes it easy to filter papers or assignments for different tasks or modules of your research project.
View a sample paper classification schema
- Field of Study: Nutrition Science, Developmental Psychology, Public Health
- Specific Topic: Nutrition for Early Childhood Cognitive Improvements
- Methodology: Secondary Dataset Analysis, Longitudinal Study
- Includes demographic data
- Includes multi-year dietary intake data
- Includes biannual childhood assessment data
- Subject Type: Parent-Child Dyads
- Region Studied: USA
This enables powerful filtering on various attributes.
Brainstorming Ideas
Stuck while brainstorming research topics or hypotheses? Explain your high-level goals, datasets and interests to Elicit AI to get an overview of potential ideas you can explore further. It analyzes research trends and gaps to provide thought-starting prompts.
As you provide more feedback on suggested ideas, Elicit AI progressively improves at recommending ideas tailored to your line of inquiry.
Customizing Elicit AI For Your Goals
Now that you‘ve seen some of Elicit‘s capabilities in action, let‘s talk about customizing it further for your niche needs.
Start by clearly defining your:
- Field of study
- Types of research questions you tackle
- Standard workflows or methodologies used
- Journals/conferences you target
Feed representative papers and questions as initial training data for Elicit AI to learn your domain.
Over time, provide feedback on outputs – highlight phrases demonstrating alignment or misalignment with your goals.
For example, flag an extracted excerpt as irrelevant or say a summary missed your research question‘s focus.
Through this feedback loop, Elicit AI will continuously improve at surfacing insights tailored for you.
Soon you‘ll have an AI assistant specialized in your niche!
How Researchers Can Leverage Elicit AI
Let‘s go through actionable tips for researchers like yourself looking to enjoy a productivity boost from Elicit AI:
Broad Literature Searches
Use open-ended queries like "What are the latest findings about how nutrition affects childhood development outcomes?" Elicit will find both semantic and contextual matches.
Extracting Relevant Parts of Papers
Have Elicit AI highlight claims, figures and parts of papers most aligned to your specific research question for easy skimming.
Streamlined Literature Reviews
Instead of laboriously reviewing papers one by one, use Elicit AI‘s summarization to get condensed overviews answering your question before deciding which studies to examine further.
This can help you cover 5-10x more ground in the time spent! Enable a truly comprehensive view of the state of research rather than significant gaps from sampling only 30-50 papers.
Classify New References
When you add new papers to your reference manager, have Elicit instantly classify them by methodology, field and other filters for easy organization.
Ideation Soundboards
Bounce early research ideas off Elicit AI to get thought-provoking suggestions and direction for further inquiry.
Over time and with feedback, Elicit AI progressively improves at providing ideas tailored to your line of thinking versus generic suggestions.
The Benefits of Elicit AI for Researchers
Let‘s recap some of the key ways leveraging Elicit AI can benefit researchers:
- Increased efficiency: Automate tedious tasks like initial paper screening so you save hours each week.
- Enhanced rigor: The summarization and extraction tools aid deeper comprehension of study methods, data and conclusions.
- Customizability: Adapt Elicit to your niche goals and benefit from tailored outputs mapped to your objectives.
- Greater discovery: Uncover 50% more relevant papers beyond just keyword search matches.
- Accelerated innovation: Get thought-starting suggestions tailored to your developing interests versus generic ideas.
What This Means for Your Research
More time on high-value analysis, deeper topical understanding, tailored recommendations…that‘s just the start.
Elicit AI augments your strengths – not replace you. Its role is to handle the tedious administrative tasks, freeing you up for knowledge breakthroughs!
The Future with AI Assistants
Elicit AI represents the crest of an exciting wave of AI-enhancement in the research domain. As these tools continue improving reasoning oversight and customization capabilities, researchers have much to benefit in terms of supercharged productivity and discovery.
Incorporating modular AI capabilities targeted to specific bottlenecks unlocks new realms of possibility. What if you could analyze millions of papers in a niche domain to uncover hidden insights? Or combine interdisciplinary knowledge in creative ways human capacity can‘t match?
We‘ve only scratched the surface of transformations AI can enable when ethically building these collaborative tools rather than competing with researchers.
The future promises greatly accelerated research and innovation cycles through this symbiotic partnership! Now is the time to start integrating these force-multipliers into your workflow.
Ready to take the next step? Get in touch with my team to start trialing Elicit AI tailored for your projects!
