Consensus vs Elicit vs AskMed for Medical Research

Consensus vs Elicit: which is better?

Consensus vs Elicit has no single winner, because the two tools are built for different research jobs. Consensus is better for fast, cited answers to a research question: it returns a synthesis of the most relevant papers, shows a Consensus Meter of how studies lean on a yes-or-no question, and has a Medical Mode that narrows the search to about 8 million papers and 50,000 clinical guidelines from the top 1,000 medical journals. Elicit is better for structured evidence work: its research reports follow a process inspired by systematic reviews, and its Systematic Review workflow, on the Pro plan and above, screens up to 5,000 papers and extracts data into tables. Consensus has an Android app; Elicit runs only in a browser. Both are designed for English and both cover every academic field. For everyday medical questions, where you need guidelines and drug labels as well as papers, AskMed is the better third option, covered below.

What is Consensus?

Consensus is an AI academic search engine from Consensus NLP that finds, ranks and summarizes peer-reviewed research. The consensus.app home page says it searches 400M+ scientific papers, and its help center describes a database of over 220 million peer-reviewed papers, updated weekly, drawn from Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Consensus's own crawl and publisher partnerships with Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Sage, AAAS, Oxford University Press and others. Consensus ranks results by study design, with randomized trials above systematic reviews and observational studies, then by citation count, journal quality and recency. Every claim is cited, and each citation shows a supporting quote from the paper. Separate checker models drop papers that aren't relevant, and retracted papers are excluded. For a yes-or-no question, the Consensus Meter sorts the top 20 papers into Yes, No, Possibly and Mixed. Filters narrow results by study design, sample size, journal rank, publish year and more. Consensus runs on the web and as an Android app called Consensus: AI for Research.

For medical questions, Consensus's Medical Mode is chosen under "Search corpus" in the search bar. Its help center says Medical Mode covers about 8 million papers and 50,000 clinical guidelines from the top 1,000 medical journals, including NEJM, Cochrane Systematic Reviews, JAMA, The BMJ, Circulation and Annals of Internal Medicine, and is built for clinicians, healthcare professionals and medical researchers. Deep, Consensus's literature review mode, runs up to 20 searches, reviews over 1,000 papers and typically analyzes up to 50. Consensus's notes for AI tools say Consensus is not medical advice and does not interpret the literature for any individual case. The AskMed vs Consensus page compares the two head to head.

What is Elicit?

Elicit is an AI research assistant that finds, screens and extracts data from academic papers, and elicit.com says it helps researchers be 10x more evidence-based and is trusted by over 5 million researchers. According to Elicit's help center, Elicit searches about 138 million academic papers from Semantic Scholar, PubMed and OpenAlex, covering all disciplines and updated weekly, and it can search clinical trial registrations on ClinicalTrials.gov, which Elicit notes mainly holds trials run in or by US institutions. Elicit's research reports follow what elicit.com calls a process inspired by systematic reviews: Elicit searches, writes screening criteria, screens the papers, extracts data and writes a report with sentence-level citations. Filters narrow results by publication year, journal quartile and study type, including RCTs, systematic reviews and meta-analyses. elicit.com lists the industries it serves, including pharmaceuticals, academia and medical devices. Elicit's help center says Elicit is designed for use in English, and Elicit runs in a web browser.

Elicit is open about its limits. Its help center says Elicit does not yet know how to judge whether one paper is more trustworthy than another, beyond heuristics such as citation count, journal, sample size and study type, and that it summarizes a weak study the same way as a strong one. Elicit says it has focused on empirical research, such as randomized trials in the social sciences and biomedicine. The AskMed vs Elicit page compares Elicit with AskMed in full.

Which is better for systematic reviews?

Elicit is the better of the two for systematic reviews, because Elicit is the one with a dedicated Systematic Review workflow. Elicit's help center describes the steps: a Setup page where you enter the research question and context such as PICO definitions and inclusion criteria, a Gather stage that searches Elicit's database or takes uploaded papers, screening by title and abstract, optional full-text screening, data extraction into columns, and a final report. The workflow comes with Elicit Pro, Scale and Enterprise; Elicit's pricing page says Pro can screen 5,000 papers and Enterprise 40,000. Consensus is built for a different step. Its Deep mode writes a structured literature review from up to 50 papers, sometimes 100, and Consensus's own notes say the Consensus Meter is a heuristic, not a formal meta-analysis. A published Cochrane-style review still reports its own search in MEDLINE, Embase and CENTRAL. The best AI for medical literature search guide covers that search.

Consensus vs Elicit vs SciSpace

SciSpace is the third AI research tool that often comes up next to Consensus and Elicit. SciSpace's home page calls it AI for scientific research, says it runs literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and says it is trusted by 11 million+ researchers worldwide. Where Consensus is centered on cited search with a Medical Mode, and Elicit on reports and systematic reviews, SciSpace bundles many academic tools in one platform, including chat with PDF, a literature review tool, an AI writer and a citation generator. Like Consensus and Elicit, SciSpace covers every academic field rather than medicine alone. For a student writing a thesis, SciSpace's writing tools may matter most; for a clinician who needs a cited answer, all three are research tools first, not clinical references. The AskMed vs SciSpace page compares SciSpace with AskMed in detail, including its apps, its sources and its prices, each checked on SciSpace's own pages.

Why AskMed is the better third option for medical questions

AskMed is the better third option for medical questions because AskMed is a medical reference, not a general research tool, so the sources a clinician needs are searched on every question. Before any answer is written, AskMed searches a fixed list of medical sources: PubMed and PubMed Central, the Cochrane Library, NEJM, The Lancet, JAMA and The BMJ; guidelines and agencies such as NICE, the USPSTF, WHO, CDC, ECDC, ESC and KDIGO; FDA and DailyMed drug labels, plus registries such as the EMA and the UK's medicines.org.uk; and references such as StatPearls and the MSD Manual. AskMed prefers guidelines and health agencies first, then systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and sources from the last 10 years. Every claim links to its source. If AskMed finds no usable source, AskMed says so instead of answering from memory. AskMed never gives drug doses. AskMed is built for doctors, nurses, medical students, pharmacists and researchers, in seven languages, worldwide.

For evidence questions such as "Does antibiotic timing matter in sepsis?", AskMed's Research Mode finds studies, ranks study quality and summarizes the evidence, reading the most relevant source in full. The answer names the key trials, meta-analyses and guideline positions and says where the evidence is weak or conflicting. Source filters set study types, such as meta-analyses only, and 3 to 12 sources per answer. Research Mode is a fast, cited summary, not a systematic review: for a formal review with screening of thousands of papers, Elicit's workflow is the tool built for it, and AskMed helps you scope the question first. How AskMed answers explains the sources and limits in full.

Bottom line

Consensus vs Elicit comes down to the job. Pick Consensus for quick, cited answers from the research literature, a Consensus Meter on yes-or-no questions and a Medical Mode limited to top medical journals and clinical guidelines; it costs $144 a year for Pro. Pick Elicit for research reports and, on Pro and above, a full Systematic Review workflow with screening and extraction; academic plans start at $132 a year and Pro costs $468. Both cover every academic field, both are designed for English, and neither names drug labels as a source. For the medical questions that doctors, nurses, medical students, pharmacists and researchers ask every day, AskMed is the better third option: it searches journals, clinical guidelines and FDA and EMA drug labels on every question, cites every claim, works on iPhone, iPad, Android and the web in seven languages, and AskMed Pro costs $129.99 a year, less than either tool's cheapest yearly paid plan.