Elicit AI Tutorial: Transform Research Papers into Quick Summaries

Drowning in research papers? Need a quick way to grasp the main points without reading every single word? Elicit, an AI research assistant, can be your lifesaver. This guide shows you exactly how to use Elicit to get useful summaries of academic articles, fast.

Forget wading through endless text. Let's make research smarter.

Why Bother Using Elicit for Summaries?

Reading and summarizing manually takes ages. Elicit offers real advantages:

🚀Getting Started with Elicit (It's Easy!)

Ready to try it? Here’s how to begin:

• Head to the Website: Go to Elicit.
• Sign Up: You'll need an account. They usually have a free option to get you started (which might summarize fewer papers at once) and paid options for more power.

• Look Around: Check out the main screen. You'll usually see a search bar – that's your starting point.

🎯Your Step-by-Step Guide to Accurate Summaries

Using Elicit feels quite natural. Follow these steps:

Step 1: Ask a Good Question

• Find the main search bar on Elicit's site.

• Type in your research question. Be specific! This is super important.
  • Instead of: “climate change effects”
  • Try: “How does rising sea level affect coastal mangrove ecosystems?“
  • Instead of: “social media use”
  • Try: “What is the relationship between adolescent sleep quality and nighttime social media use?”
• Hit Enter.

Step 2: Look at the First Results

• Elicit will search its huge library and show you a table of relevant papers.

• Right away, it usually gives you a summary paragraph. This first summary is based on the abstracts of the top few papers it found (maybe 4 papers for free users, 8 for paid). It’s a quick first look.
• Scan this summary and the list of papers. Look at the titles, authors, and maybe any extra data columns Elicit added.

Step 3: Choose Your Papers (Inside Elicit Notebooks)

• Often, the default summary is okay, but you want one based on papers you pick. This is where Elicit Notebooks shine.
• Go through the list of papers Elicit found. See the little checkboxes next to each title? Click the boxes for the papers that seem most relevant to your specific need. Maybe you pick based on title, a quick glance at the abstract snippet, or the publication date.
• You can select just one or two, or maybe up to eight papers at a time for the summarization step. (Parameter example: Select 5 highly relevant papers)

Step 4: Generate Your Custom Summary

• Once your chosen papers are checked, look for a button like “+ Add a new step” or something similar within the Notebook.
• A menu of actions will appear. Choose the option that says something like “Summarize abstracts for selected papers”.
• Boom! Elicit creates a new summary paragraph. This one is special because it's based only on the abstracts of the papers you selected, keeping your original question in mind.
• Heads up this standard summary feature mainly uses the paper's abstract. It's a great overview, but not the whole story from the full text.

Step 5: Check, Adjust, and Dig Deeper

• Read Your Summary: Does this new, custom summary make sense? Does it capture the key points from the abstracts of the papers you picked? You can usually click on citations within the summary to see the abstract of that specific paper.
• Try Different Groups: Don't be afraid to make multiple summaries! Select a different set of papers (maybe focus on newer ones, or ones with a specific method) and repeat Step 4. Comparing summaries from different paper groups can be insightful. Summarizing itself usually doesn't cost extra credits.
• Refine Your Selection: Read an abstract more closely and realize a paper isn't quite right? Just uncheck it and generate the summary again for a more accurate result.
• Ask More Questions: Elicit Notebooks let you do more. Try the “Chat with papers” feature to ask specific questions about the content of your selected documents (e.g., “What was the main limitation mentioned in these papers?”). You can also add columns to pull out specific data points (like “Population Studied” or “Key Finding”).
• Add Your Own: Got PDFs on your computer that Elicit didn't find? Use the upload feature to add them to your Notebook and include them in your summaries and analysis.

💡 Pro Tips for Getting the Best Elicit Summaries

Just clicking “summarize” is easy, but you can get even better results:

How Elicit Stacks Up

Compared to some general AI tools, Elicit is really built for the academic grind. Its focus on using real, cited papers and creating structured data tables makes it particularly useful for tasks like literature reviews. While other tools might write flowery introductions, Elicit gets straight to analyzing the research papers you care about.

Wrapping Up: Your Research Accelerator

Elicit AI is a genuinely helpful tool for anyone dealing with lots of research papers. It makes generating summaries fast and straightforward, helping you quickly understand the core ideas of studies. By asking sharp questions, carefully selecting papers in Notebooks, and using the summaries as a starting point for deeper investigation, you can seriously speed up your research process.

Stop letting mountains of papers slow you down. Give Elicit a try, follow these steps, and spend less time searching and more time thinking. Happy researching!