Elicit and Consensus: AI Tools That Only Cite Real Papers

Elicit (elicit.com) and Consensus (consensus.app) are AI tools designed for researchers — they retrieve only from real, indexed academic databases (Semantic Scholar, PubMed) instead of generating from training memory. You ask a research question; they return real papers with the abstract, key claims, and a one-sentence summary. They cannot hallucinate citations because they cannot make up a paper that isn't in the database. Both have free tiers generous enough for any high school project.

Some examples

• Elicit's free tier: 5,000 'credits' — enough for ~50 questions or 200 paper summaries; a normal AP research paper uses ~20.
• Consensus answers questions like 'does intermittent fasting improve focus' with a yes/no/mixed split across actual papers — perfect lit-review starter.
• Semantic Scholar (semanticscholar.org) is also free and is what Elicit is built on top of — direct access if you want to skip the AI layer.
• These tools tell you the citation count and venue of each paper — a 0-citation 2024 preprint deserves more skepticism than a 200-citation 2018 study.

Try it!

Pick any research question (something for AP Bio, US history, anything). Run it on Elicit and Consensus side by side. The difference between their answers is itself a lesson in scientific consensus.