Search for academic papers

Search Elicit's database of over 138 million academic papers using natural language queries.

Semantic search uses natural language understanding to find relevant papers even when the exact terms don't match.

Set corpus to pubmed to restrict results to PubMed, or leave it as the default elicit for the full paper index. Set searchMode to "keyword" to interpret the query as a Lucene-style boolean expression instead of natural language.

Filters and searchMode: "keyword" are mutually exclusive — put any filter expressions directly into the query string when using keyword search. Mixing them returns a 400.

To search clinical trials instead, use POST /api/v2/search/trials.

Limits

Each plan caps how many results a single search request may return:

Search is rate-limited only by the global limit of 100 requests per minute per IP address, applied across all endpoints and all plans. Exceeding it returns a 429 and blocks the IP for 5 minutes.

Upgrade your plan in account settings for higher per-request result caps.

Example

curl -X POST https://elicit.com/api/v2/search/papers \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer elk_live_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance"}'

{
  "query": "GLP-1 receptor agonists for weight loss",
  "searchMode": "semantic",
  "corpus": "elicit",
  "filters": {
    "minYear": 2020,
    "maxYear": 2025,
    "minEpochS": 1672531200,
    "maxEpochS": 1788294677,
    "maxQuartile": 2,
    "includeKeywords": [
      "semaglutide",
      "liraglutide"
    ],
    "excludeKeywords": [
      "rodent",
      "mouse model"
    ],
    "typeTags": [
      "RCT",
      "Meta-Analysis"
    ],
    "retracted": "exclude_retracted"
  }
}