I’ve been tasked with helping my team put together more systematic literature reviews for grant proposals. We often need to justify the research gap, and our past searches have been… inconsistent. I’ve been exploring Elicit to see if it can help create a search strategy we can reuse and update.
My goal is to build a workflow where we can:
1. Start with a well-defined research question.
2. Run a comprehensive search that captures key papers.
3. Document the exact process so we can run it again in 6 months, or so a new team member can follow it exactly.
Here’s my current approach and where I’m stuck. I begin by framing a question in Elicit, like “What are the barriers to adoption of telemedicine in rural communities?” I get a good initial set of papers. I use the “snowballing” features to find prior and subsequent work, which is great. I export the list to a CSV for our records.
But the reproducibility part feels fragile. If I come back and enter the same question, the results aren't identical—new papers appear, some drop off. I understand why that happens, but for a grant, we need to be able to point to a *specific* search we performed on a *specific* date.
Is the best practice to simply export and save everything at the point of search? Or is there a way within Elicit to “save” a search state more permanently? I’m also curious how others handle documenting which papers were excluded and why. Are you using Elicit’s lists and tags for this, or taking the data into another tool like Airtable or Sheets for screening?