Elicit vs Inciteful

Elicit is an AI research assistant for researchers gathering and assessing evidence. Its Research Agent draws on scientific databases, academic journals, public data sources, uploaded documents, a corpus of 138 million academic papers, and the wider web. A session can use up to 20 uploaded resources, including PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and JPG files. Elicit offers Research Agent sessions, Research Reports, and Systematic Reviews, and supports AI-generated claims with sentence-level citations to underlying sources. It can find up to 1,000 relevant papers and analyze up to 20,000 data points at once. Research Reports export as PDF or Word, tables as CSV or Excel, and references as RIS or BIB. Elicit runs on the web and provides an API, but API access requires Pro or above. Its MCP server connects to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and other compatible clients using OAuth 2.0. Basic is free with limited usage for Research Agent and Research Reports; Plus costs $11 a month. Pro is $39 a month and Scale is $89 a month. Elicit states that it has achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance.

Inciteful is a free web tool that helps researchers discover academic literature through citation networks. Paper Discovery builds a network around selected papers and surfaces important and similar papers, along with authors and institutions. Results can be filtered by keyword, distance, and year. Literature Connector maps citation paths between two papers in an interactive visualization, supporting interdisciplinary work and entry into unfamiliar research areas. Inciteful says its database covers more than 240 million academic papers and indexes more than 2 billion citations, using sources including OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Crossref, and OpenCitations. Researchers can import BibTeX files to seed a graph, provided entries include DOIs, then export results in BibTeX format or to Zotero, Mendeley, or another reference manager. Core tools are free with no stated usage limits. The maker says the codebase is fully open source. Graph Pruning is beta and may not remain supported or become permanent.