Elicit: An AI Tool Meant to Assist Individuals with Research

What is Elicit?

Elicit AI is a free, AI-powered research assistant that helps with literature reviews and other research tasks.

How can I use Elicit?

Elicit has many uses, including:

• Literature reviews: Elicit can help speed up the literature review process by finding relevant papers, summarizing key takeaways, and extracting key information.
• Fact checking: Elicit can help verify the accuracy of information on a specific topic.
• Streamlining research workflows: Elicit can help automate tedious tasks and allocate more time to critical thinking.
• Expanding personal knowledge: Learn more about a topic of interest with the help of systematic reviews and meta-analyses that are generated by Elicit.

Watch the following video to learn more about the uses and applications of Elicit:

Why should I take care when using Elicit?

While generative AI tools like Elicit can help users with such tasks as locating research articles, organizing existing information, mapping out scholarly discussions, or summarizing sources, the outputs they provide are not always entirely factual or grounded in the best research strategies. To the contrary, Elicit has been known to hallucinate, or "describe false information created by the AI system to defend its statements." Oftentimes, Elicit will generate outputs without qualifying the accuracy of the information it provides, and it has been known to confidently provide responses to queries that nonetheless consist of partially or fully fabricated citations or facts.

Additionally, generative AI tools like Elicit sometimes will provide outputs that lack currency, as some of the large language models that they are trained on lack access to the latest research in a given field of study. In some instances, the information that Elicit will consult to provide a summary of extant research will be based on old datasets, thereby causing it to frame the information it shares as current when, in reality, it is not.

The use of generative AI tools like Elicit in academia has also raised many concerns about academic integrity and the respect of intellectual property. One area of academic integrity affected by generative AI tools like Elicit is that of false citations.

Providing false citations in research, whether one intends to or not, is a violation of St. Catherine University's academic integrity policy. Generative AI tools such as Elicit have been known to generate false citations, and even if the citations are based on actual papers, the cited content in Elicit might still be inaccurate, placing the onus of interrogating the accuracy of it on the user of the AI tool.

Where can I find more information about Elicit?

For more information on Elicit, please refer to the FAQ page for the generative AI tool.

Last updated December 4, 2024

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