Elicit vs Semantic Scholar

Elicit

• Researchers running systematic reviews with screening and data extraction
• Finding papers from a research question instead of exact keywords
• Teams that need cited evidence reports to support a decision

Semantic Scholar

• Free literature search across all fields of science
• Keeping up with new papers through alerts and recommendation feeds
• Developers who need open scholarly data through an API

Elicit

• The pricing page defaults to industry rates; the $11 Plus plan appears only when Academic is selected.
• The systematic review workflow, Routines and API access start at the Pro plan.
• Monthly usage does not roll over. Extra usage on Pro and Scale is billed in $100 increments, up to a limit you set.
• Real-time collaboration, extraction from figures and the admin panel need Scale or Enterprise.

Semantic Scholar

• There is no smartphone app; the FAQ says the site is designed to be used in mobile browsers.
• TLDR summaries are limited to papers in computer science and the biomedical fields.
• Semantic Reader is in beta and covers mostly arXiv papers, and Ask This Paper works on a limited set of papers.
• Unauthenticated API calls share one pool of 1,000 requests per second; an API key starts at 1 request per second.

Elicit

Research Agent

Gathers evidence from scientific databases, journals, public data sources and uploaded documents, then produces cited reports, tables, figures and slides.

Paper and clinical trial search

Semantic search over more than 138 million papers from Semantic Scholar, PubMed and OpenAlex, plus about 545,000 clinical trials, so a query does not depend on exact keywords.

Research reports

Generates research briefs through a process modeled on systematic reviews. You can change which papers and what information a report covers.

Systematic review workflow

Automates screening and data extraction, with a Pro workflow that can screen 5,000 papers. A Chrome extension fetches full texts through your institution's journal access.

Library and Zotero import

Stores sources in collections with tags so they can be reused across projects, and takes in papers from Zotero, PDFs, and .ris or .bib files.

Routines and API

Routines rerun Research Agent work to pick up new evidence, and an API covers search, reports and systematic reviews. Both start at the Pro plan.

Semantic Scholar

Paper search with TLDR summaries

Searches papers with filters for venue, author, publication type and date. TLDRs are very short AI summaries, available for nearly 60 million papers in computer science, biology and medicine.

Highly Influential Citations

A machine-learning model flags the citations where the cited paper had a significant effect on the citing one, so a long citation list has a starting point.

Library and Research Feeds

Save papers into folders, share public folders and bulk export citations. Turning on a Research Feed for a folder brings paper recommendations based on its contents.

Paper and author alerts

Email alerts report new citations of a chosen paper, or new papers and citations for an author you follow.

Semantic Reader

A beta reading view for most arXiv papers, with in-line citation cards, a table of contents, AI skimming highlights and on-demand definitions of terms.

Academic Graph API and datasets

A REST API for papers, authors, citations, venues and recommendations, plus downloadable datasets. Most endpoints work without a key.

Elicit

• Basic$0

  Unlimited paper search, summaries and chat with papers, Zotero import, and limited Research Agent and report usage.

• Pro$49

  per user / month, billed annually ($588); $75 billed monthly

  Standard usage, a systematic review workflow that screens 5,000 papers, 20 table columns at a time, Routines and API access.

• Scale$169

  per user / month, billed annually ($2,028); $279 billed monthly

  5x the usage of Pro, real-time collaboration, extraction from figures, 30 table columns at a time and an admin panel with seat management.

• EnterpriseCustom

  Custom usage, SSO and SAML, screening of 40,000 papers, 40 extraction columns, custom data sources and unlimited API access.

Semantic Scholar

• Free$0

  Search, TLDR summaries, Semantic Reader, a paper library, alerts and Research Feeds, plus rate-limited API access.

Elicit

• Annual discount

  Save 35% to 39% with annual billing

  On industry pricing, Pro is $49 a month billed annually against $75 billed monthly, and Scale is $169 against $279. The pricing page labels these as savings of 35% and 39%.

• Education

  Academic pricing from $11 per user / month

  Choosing Academic on the pricing page shows Plus at $11, Pro at $39 and Scale at $89 per user / month, billed annually, or $19, $69 and $149 billed monthly.

• Nonprofit

  Nonprofits can use the academic plans

  Elicit has no separate nonprofit discount, but its help center says nonprofits can subscribe to the academic plans, its lowest pricing tier.

Semantic Scholar

No public discounts listed.