Move your team from Consensus to Elicit.

Both products expose their academic paper search to external tools, but through different integration styles. Consensus offers a ChatGPT App and an MCP server (docs.consensus.app / consensus.app/home/mcp/) that lets ChatGPT, Claude, and other MCP-compatible AI assistants call Consensus's 200M+ paper corpus from within a conversation; MCP access was made freely available at launch. Elicit offers a REST API (docs.elicit.com) for programmatic search, report generation, and systematic reviews. To migrate: teams using Consensus in ChatGPT conversations for ad-hoc research can switch to Elicit's API to build the same capability into their own application or script — Elicit's POST /api/v1/search endpoint returns semantic search results equivalent to what the Consensus ChatGPT App surfaces. Teams building MCP-based AI workflows that call Consensus can call Elicit's API endpoints from a custom MCP wrapper instead. Update authentication from Consensus account connection to an Elicit Bearer token (key format: elk_live_*).

Both tools provide semantic natural-language search across large academic paper corpora. Consensus searches 220M+ papers via consensus.app and returns a ranked list with one-line AI summaries; Elicit searches 138M+ deduplicated papers from Semantic Scholar, PubMed, and OpenAlex. To migrate a search workflow, re-run your existing queries on the destination tool using the same natural-language phrasing — both tools support conversational queries without keyword syntax. Elicit lets you apply filters (year, study type, journal quartile, PDF availability) from the results page; Consensus filters include study design, sample size, and recency. There is no bulk export of saved search history between the two platforms — recreate important searches manually and save them in the destination's Collections (Consensus) or Notebooks (Elicit). Consensus's free plan gives unlimited basic searches; Elicit's Basic tier also gives unlimited searches, so initial testing on both is free.

Both platforms provide AI analysis of individual papers with citations tied to the source text. Consensus's Study Snapshot extracts method/result fields (population, study design, outcomes, sample size) for a single paper in one click; Ask Paper lets you chat with a paper's full text and get answers with the exact passage highlighted. Elicit applies sentence-level citation grounding uniformly to all AI outputs — summaries, data extractions, and report claims all point to exact quotes from the source paper. To migrate per-paper analysis: in Elicit, add papers to a Notebook or table and use the per-paper summaries and data-extraction columns; every extracted value comes with a supporting quote. Full-text chat (equivalent to Ask Paper) is available in Elicit Notebooks for papers where a PDF is accessible. Export your paper list from Consensus as a collection and re-search or upload PDFs in Elicit to continue analysis.

Both features provide structured, comparable views of findings across multiple papers, but they approach it differently. Consensus Meter applies to yes/no questions and aggregates how many papers support 'yes', 'no', or 'possibly/mixed', giving an at-a-glance read on scientific agreement. Elicit's data-extraction columns let you define custom fields (open-ended, yes/no/maybe, multiple-choice) and extract those data points from each paper's full text into a table, giving structured comparability across papers. To migrate: reformulate your Consensus Meter question as one or more Elicit extraction columns — for example, a yes/no column asking whether the paper's findings support the hypothesis. Build a preset column set in Elicit that captures the same stance classification; the table output shows per-paper answers with supporting quotes. While the Consensus Meter produces an aggregate visualisation, Elicit's table gives the underlying data you can then count and compare yourself.

Both tools can take a research question and produce an AI-synthesized overview grounded in multiple papers with inline citations. Consensus calls this feature Pro Analysis (formerly Copilot) plus Deep Search — you enter a natural-language question and the AI screens up to 1,000 papers and writes a structured report on the ~50 most relevant. Elicit calls the equivalent Automated Reports, which search papers, extract data, and synthesize findings into a structured report covering up to 200 papers. To switch: run the same research question on the destination tool, then compare the paper lists and synthesized text; both outputs carry citations so you can verify sourcing. Neither platform exports synthesis results in a format the other can import directly — copy-paste the report text or download CSVs of the underlying paper lists for handoff. On Elicit, navigate to the Reports section and enter the research question; on Consensus, run a Deep Search for the equivalent structured output.