Elicit is built specifically for academic research, letting you search millions of papers, extract key findings, and organize results into a structured table you can use to track what you have read and reviewed. It pulls from databases like Semantic Scholar and surfaces methodology, sample sizes, and conclusions without requiring you to open every PDF. Perplexity is a strong alternative when you want fast, cited answers that draw from recent web sources alongside academic content. NotebookLM works well if you already have PDFs and want to annotate and query them in one free workspace.