Best AI Research Assistants: Consensus and Elicit for Academic Work

A broad question such as “what affects employee retention?” can lead to several jobs. You may need a short answer with credible papers to read, or a table comparing populations, methods and findings across dozens of studies. Consensus presents an academic search and cited-analysis workflow. Elicit documents semantic search plus screening and extraction. Those workflows can overlap, but the output you need should decide the trial. Write down the fields and sources a colleague would need to check your conclusion before comparing plans.

Start with a narrow question, then change one element of it: the population, outcome, time period or setting. Inspect whether the assistant returns a useful range of papers or repeats the same few sources. Consensus offers Pro messages and longer Deep reviews; Elicit offers search, summaries and research reports. A larger advertised paper corpus does not prove stronger coverage of your particular discipline. Keep a few known relevant papers as a reference set and check whether the search finds them. That makes the evaluation more useful than judging how polished an answer sounds.

For structured reviews, agree on inclusion criteria before asking an assistant to screen papers. In Elicit, the Pro plan lists a dedicated review workflow that can screen 5,000 papers and add 20 columns to tables at a time. Test a small set with fields such as study design, sample, outcome and limitations. Include a paper that should be excluded and one that does not report a requested value. The useful behavior is a traceable answer or a clear missing value. An invented number can make an otherwise tidy table unusable.

Consensus Free lists 15 Pro messages and up to three Deep reviews per month. Its annual pricing view lists Pro at a $12 monthly equivalent, billed $144 annually, with unlimited Pro messages and 15 Deep reviews per month. Deep is a $45 monthly equivalent billed $540 annually, with 200 Deep reviews per month. Elicit Basic offers free search and summaries with limited agent and report usage. Elicit Pro is $49 per user/month billed $588 annually; Scale is $169 billed $2,028 annually. These prices were checked September 11, 2026. Count the reviews, collaborators and extraction work you expect before making an annual commitment.

For each conclusion, save the research question, the original paper and the passage supporting the claim. Distinguish direct findings from interpretation, and record any papers you excluded. Check whether a cited paper actually studied your target population and whether its limitations change the conclusion. Ask a colleague to reproduce one row of the extraction table or one key claim from the original source. This guide compares documented capabilities and pricing; it does not rank output accuracy from a hands-on benchmark. The Consensus vs Elicit comparison is a compact starting point for your trial.