Elicit is a tool for creating and thinking about literature reviews and research article genres. It automates summarizing academic papers and extracting key findings, making it helpful for highlighting relationships among and key elements of sources. Elicit can help students get started with preliminary research. It can also be used to think about the genre of the academic article or the literature review and help students develop their own reviews.
Elicit: Quick Steps for Initial Thinking About Projects
Elicit allows users to:
- quickly understand the main points of research articles
- retrieve a list of potential sources for a project
- turn research questions into literature reviews
- compare genre components of academic articles like methods, findings, and limitations
Features
- Gives quick summaries of research sources
- Shows how often sources have been cited by others
- provides short summaries of literature related to the topic
- Pulls out the main findings from articles
- Can pull out and compare genre elements of articles
How to use Elicit
- Have students develop and refine topics and research questions by exploring results of queries
- Have students conduct multiple searches and compare the kinds of sources returned
- Use the summaries and reviews provided to talk about genre elements of literature reviews
- Have students pull different elements (e.g., findings, methodologies, interventions) into their summaries to explore genre conventions
- Ask students to conduct their own research and develop reviews, and then compare the results with the AI-generated output
Watch out for. . . .
When considering how to integrate Elicit in the classroom, pay attention to the following concerns:
- Be mindful of the stages in the research process; Elicit can help with early-stage gathering of sources and topic development.
- Don’t rely only on the sources provided by Elicit. Many AI tools will use the most available sources and won’t have access to many sources behind firewalls.
- Avoid the idea that the output provides a complete step in the research process. Encourage students to build and develop their own summaries and literature reviews.
- Make sure to continue to teach source evaluation. The summaries are helpful but unlikely to pick out the biases and alternatives that are revealed by spending time with the materials.