Elicit.org integration

If you haven’t tried elicit.org yet you should - legendary search engine that pulls out relevant research based on a completely mundane question, along with a gist of the findings. Hoping some kind of Elicit-like search can be built into Obsidian as well.

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Sorry to take so long in responding to this thread. I only recently came across Elicit and have only been using Obsidian since April.

Yes, I strongly agree that:

  1. Both tools are very powerful and have great potential in working together.
  2. This would really benefit from a plugin
  3. While the Elicit team has stated that they are avoiding a knowledge-management approach and are instead focused on the search process, it is clear that we need some way of managing the results that Elicit generates.

This might be something where BetterBibTex and Zotero might also be helpful.

Elicit does offer the output from its searches in two ways: a standard BIB file that can be imported into any reference manager (hence the comment about BetterBibTex and Zotero). It also offers a CSV export – this is extensible in Elicit so that you can add the metadata that you want to include.

Typically I will add the options of ‘Detailed Abstract Summary’ and the ‘Main Points’ into the reported metadata and those are then included in the CSV.

So far, I have been importing the BIB file into Zotero and then manually adding the rows from the CSV file as Notes and annotations in Zotero. But Zotero itself is not that good at handling custom fields and extended references. So this is where an Obsidian plugin might be helpful, since it is already possible to connect Obsidian and Zotero. If I understand BetterBibTex correctly, I think it could be tweaked to support this.

I don’t think that this would be difficult to code but I confess that my coding skills are not up to this. I am happy to contribute in other ways if anyone is interested in taking this forwards. Best way to reach me direct is email: topps AT ucalgary DOT ca