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 use corpus-specific query syntax instead of natural language: Lucene-style boolean expressions for elicit, and PubMed syntax such as [Title/Abstract] and [MeSH] for pubmed.

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

maxResults defaults to 10. Search returns up to that many results in one response; it does not provide a pagination cursor. Each plan caps how many results a single request may return. A value above your plan's cap returns 400 invalid_request rather than being silently reduced:

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": 1792711195,
    "maxQuartile": 2,
    "includeKeywords": [
      "semaglutide",
      "liraglutide"
    ],
    "excludeKeywords": [
      "rodent",
      "mouse model"
    ],
    "typeTags": [
      "RCT",
      "Meta-Analysis"
    ],
    "retracted": "exclude_retracted"
  }
}