AI for Literature Review & Research

Start by formulating a specific research question. Instead of 'Constitutional law', ask 'What are the judicial principles governing the right to privacy under the Indian Constitution post-Aadhaar judgment'. Write your question in natural language as you would ask a legal expert. This clarity helps Elicit's semantic search find the most relevant cases and articles. Document your research scope, time period, and any specific jurisdictions or statutes you want to focus on.

Enter your research question into Elicit's Find Papers search box. Elicit will search across 138 million papers and return the 8 most relevant results with summaries, plus a table of papers. Review the summaries to understand how Elicit interpreted your question. Use the Filter button to narrow results by year of publication, journal quality, or full text availability. Load more papers incrementally up to 100 results to ensure comprehensive coverage of your legal topic.

Add custom columns to Elicit's table to extract specific legal information from papers. For case analysis, create columns like 'Court', 'Year', 'Legal Issue', 'Ratio Decidendi', 'Applicable Statute', and 'Dissenting Opinion'. Elicit's AI automatically populates these columns by analyzing paper content. Review the extracted information and verify accuracy by checking highlighted source text. This structured extraction transforms raw papers into organized legal data you can use directly in your research or arguments.

Save relevant papers to your Elicit Library for future reference. Import papers from Zotero, Mendeley, or upload PDFs directly. Use Elicit's semantic deduplication feature to automatically identify and merge duplicate cases or articles. Tag papers with custom labels like 'Landmark Judgment', 'Recent Development', or 'Dissenting Opinion'. This organized library becomes your personal legal research database that you can search, filter, and launch new analyses from without re-searching.

For quick summaries, use Elicit's Research Report feature to generate a comprehensive overview of your legal topic with citations. For rigorous thesis or research paper work, use Systematic Review to define inclusion criteria, screen papers against those criteria using AI, and extract structured data. Elicit's Systematic Review achieves 96.4 percent screening recall and 94 percent data extraction accuracy. Export your findings as PDF or Word for use in assignments, thesis chapters, or placement portfolio materials.