I've been evaluating Elicit as a potential tool to streamline our organization's grant proposal process, specifically from the perspective of maintaining a rigorous audit trail for our compliance needs (we're subject to SOX and have elements of HIPAA in our data). The promise of automating literature reviews and synthesizing findings is compelling, but I'm trying to determine if the operational benefits justify the subscription cost, especially when weighed against the need for meticulous, verifiable source tracking.
My primary use case would involve using Elicit to:
* Rapidly identify foundational papers and recent studies to bolster the "background and significance" sections of grant applications.
* Generate summaries of specific research questions across a large corpus of papers to ensure we're not missing key counter-arguments.
* Potentially extract and tabulate key study parameters (e.g., sample sizes, outcomes) from multiple PDFs for preliminary data tables.
However, my diligence as a log reader raises several questions about its fit for a high-stakes, compliance-aware environment:
* **Provenance and Audit Trail:** How granular is Elicit's own logging for a user's activity? If I use it to find 20 papers that inform a grant section, can I generate a report showing the exact queries, the papers returned, and which were used in a synthesis? This is critical for internal reviews and potential funder inquiries.
* **Source Integrity:** When Elicit provides an answer or summary, does it maintain a clear, unbroken link to the exact source text? I'm concerned about the risk of a "hallucinated" citation or a misattributed finding making its way into a proposal. My workflow would require cross-checking every claim against the original PDF, which could negate time savings.
* **Data Handling for Compliance:** For the papers we upload (e.g., draft proposals, internal data summaries), what is Elicit's data retention policy? Does it align with typical grant agency confidentiality expectations? From a vendor audit perspective, I'd need to map its data flows against our compliance requirements.
A technical observation from my trial: while the table extraction feature is powerful, the output often requires significant normalization before being usable. For example, extracting methodology details into a CSV:
```csv
"Study Title","Sample Size","Outcome Measure","Reported Value"
"Effects of X...","n=150","Blood Pressure","Mean Δ -12.4 mmHg"
"A Trial of Y...","153 subjects","Systolic BP","-11.2 (SD 3.1)"
```
This inconsistency in terminology and formatting necessitates a manual reconciliation step, which is another point where time savings might be eroded.
I am curious if any other members in the community have integrated Elicit into a formal grant writing workflow, particularly within an institution that has strong compliance and documentation standards. Have you found the subscription to be "worth it" when factoring in the necessary overhead for quality control and audit-proofing its outputs? More specifically, does its use demonstrably shorten the grant development cycle enough to offset its cost and the inherent risks of relying on an AI model for scholarly content?
Logs don't lie.