Introducing Elicit Systematic Review

Today, we announce Elicit Systematic Review, a workflow that guides you step by step through search, title & abstract screening and full-text data extraction.

Systematic reviews are the gold standard for summarizing scientific literature. These reviews start with up to 20,000 papers that are winnowed down in multiple stages with explicit criteria, down to 30-100 papers. Teams of 3-5 people meticulously extract data from the papers and summarize the findings. Systematicity, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and reproducibility are a must. 

Governments use systematic reviews to design evidence-backed policies. Medical device manufacturers use systematic reviews to ensure that their products have no negative side effects. CPG companies use systematic reviews to make sure they don’t market the health benefits of their products inaccurately.

But doing all of this manually takes 3 months to more than a year. At the current pace of science, most reviews are outdated on arrival. This is too long to help inform time-sensitive policies and decisions. Without a way to summarize the exponentially growing body of literature, we don’t know what we know.

Now, with AI and language models, Elicit can help you save up to 80% of the time it takes to do systematic reviews, without compromising on accuracy.

How it works

Elicit now supports almost all major steps of the systematic review process:

Elicit Systematic Review guides you through each of these steps:

1. Gather all of the papers for your systematic review
2. Define your screening criteria
3. Evaluate the screening decisions
4. Define your extraction criteria
5. Extract data from all of your screened-in papers

Define your research question

Start with your research question. Elicit will suggest ways to clarify the question or explore additional angles.

Elicit will use this research question to suggest screening criteria and data extraction fields.

Gather relevant papers

Next, consolidate all of your papers. Upload PDFs, or select papers you've already uploaded from your library.

For publication or regulatory-grade systematic reviews, you will often have to default to traditional, keyword-based search methods. In that case, you can run your traditional searches, import the resulting papers into Elicit, and then just use Elicit search as a supplement. You can automatically add up to 500 papers from Elicit's semantic search to confirm that traditional methods did not miss relevant papers.

Screening

Then, refine your screening criteria on a small sample of papers. We’ll automatically generate relevant screening criteria (using your original research question), so you don’t have to start from scratch.

At any point, you can edit the AI suggestion, override it, or manually enter your own.

Elicit will sort papers by their likelihood of meeting all of your screening criteria. You can check Elicit’s detailed screening recommendations and manually override any disagreements.

Data extraction

As with screening, Elicit will generate suggestions for data extraction based on your research question. You can edit, override, or manually enter your own.

Elicit always provides supporting quotes from the paper and an explanation so that you can easily check the AI-generated answers for accuracy.

Other key features

• You can export the results of any step into a CSV for further data cleaning or analysis.
• You can go back to any step of the process and change it at any time. This allows you to create "living reviews" that can easily update as new papers are published.
• You can run any step independently without running the others. If you just want to do screening without doing data extraction (or vice versa), feel free!
• The entire review project is shareable. On Elicit Team and Enterprise, you and your collaborators can edit reviews together in real time! You can also share view-only links to the review.

Conclusion

Systematic reviews are the gold standard of summarizing scientific literature. But their rigor has historically made them too expensive and slow.

Elicit Systematic Review teaches AI to follow this expert human process, while also leaving room for you to take control.

By automating rigorous scientific summarization, we hope to radically increase the world’s ability to understand what is known.

Systematic Reviews are available to Elicit Pro, Team, and Enterprise users.

For a video tutorial, check out: