Elicit

active

AI research assistant for scientific literature. 138M papers + 545K clinical trials, sentence-level citations, Claude Opus 4.5 extraction. API launched March 2026. Reddit-endorsed as 'essential for meta-analyses.'

Score 40

Where it wins

138M+ papers + 545K clinical trials — largest academic database coverage

Sentence-level citations — highest citation granularity of any tool

Reddit r/GradSchool: 'essential for meta-analyses' — organic endorsement

API launched March 2026 — enables programmatic research workflows

Claude Opus 4.5 for extraction — best-in-class LLM backbone

Reports up to 80 papers with strict screening

$10/mo Basic, $42/mo Plus — affordable for academics

Where to be skeptical

Specialized for academic research — not for general market/web research

Closed source, no self-hosting

111 HN pts — lower than general-purpose platforms

API is new (Mar 2026) — limited third-party integrations so far

Editorial verdict

#1 in academic/scientific research subcategory. Purpose-built for systematic reviews and meta-analyses — no other tool does structured data extraction across dozens of papers. API launch (Mar 2026) enables programmatic workflows. Reddit r/GradSchool endorsement is strong organic signal.

Source

Docs: elicit.com

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Research

#09of 12

Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, clinical research, data extraction

GPT Researcher

Open-source autonomous deep research agent. CMU DeepResearchGym #1 on citation quality, report quality, info coverage. 25.8K stars, 15.9K weekly PyPI downloads. Apache 2.0.

Tongyi DeepResearch

First fully open-source deep research agent matching closed-source leaders on benchmarks. HLE 32.9 (exceeds OpenAI's 26.6), 30.5B params / 3.3B active (MoE), runs locally. 18.5K stars. Apache 2.0.

STORM (Stanford)

Stanford's LLM-powered knowledge curation system. Generates Wikipedia-style articles with citations in ~3 min. 28K stars, 84.8% citation recall / 85.2% precision (peer-reviewed). MIT license.