On December 3th 2025 we used a participant’s prompt to test how Elicit, SciSpace and Perplexity (the latter not being specific for literature search) address this issue:

Identify papers that experimentally investigate whether Ruminococcus gnavus utilizes mucin as a carbon source.

Elicit

Can Ruminococcus gnavus utilise mucin as carbon source? Identify papers where this was experimentally checked.

Elicit’s workflow is multi steps:

1. Paper sources: where relevant papers will be identified. 497 papers where found
2. Screening criteria: in this step the content of the papers is screened using filters that can be autodefined or user-defined. Elicit decided to use these filters:
   • Authentic Mucin Substrates (Does this study use authentic mucin substrates (such as purified mucin, mucin glycoproteins, or mucin-like substrates) as carbon sources?)
   • Controlled Laboratory Study (Is this an in vitro laboratory study with controlled conditions using pure cultures, co-cultures, or defined microbial communities containing R. gnavus?)
   • Experimental Mucin Testing (Does this study include direct experimental testing of R. gnavus growth or metabolic activity on mucin-containing media or mucin as a carbon source?)
   • Measurable Mucin Utilization Outcomes (Does this study report measurable outcomes related to mucin utilization (such as bacterial growth, mucin degradation, enzymatic activity, metabolic products, or gene expression related to mucin metabolism)?)
3. Screening recommendations: using the criteria, decide which papers to include
4. Extraction: Use suggested extraction columns or add your own. We’ll extract from a small set of sources to help you evaluate extraction results and refine column definitions (see image below)
5. Research Report: PDF

The entire workflow is available online but I dont know for how long.

SciSpace

SciSpace has a nice tabular output of papers:

• paper_table_mucin-metabol.csv
• paper_table_ruminococcus.csv
• paper_table_ruminococcus.csv
• paper_table_ruminococcus.csv
• paper_table_ruminococcus.csv
• paper_table_the-role-of-m.csv
• pubmed_ruminococcus_mucin.csv
• scholar_ruminococcus_mucin.csv
• scispace_fulltext_ruminococcus_mucin.csv
• scispace_ruminococcus_mucin.csv

and finally generates a report

Perplexity

Perplexity report can be exported as markdown or word and contains all the sources (web pages, including Pubmed) used.

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