asta-skill — Semantic Scholar via Ai2 Asta MCP 🔭

中文文档 | Asta MCP Overview | Request API Key

What it does

• Search the Semantic Scholar academic corpus by keyword, title, author, or full-text snippet
• Look up a paper from any ID (DOI, arXiv, PMID, PMCID, CorpusId, MAG, ACL, SHA, URL)
• Traverse citations — find who cited a given paper, with filtering and pagination
• Batch-lookup multiple papers in one call via get_paper_batch
• Snippet search — retrieve ~500-word passages from paper bodies for evidence grounding
• Author discovery — find researchers and list their publications
• Zero-code integration — the skill is a pure instruction pack; all I/O goes through the Asta MCP server
• Triggers automatically whenever the user asks for papers, citations, academic search, or literature discovery and Asta tools are registered

Multi-Platform Support

Works with any agent that speaks MCP and any host that loads Agent Skills:

Comparison

vs. semanticscholar-skill (our REST-based sibling)

vs. no skill (native agent)

Prerequisites

• An agent host with MCP support (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenClaw, etc.)

• An Asta API key — request here

  export ASTA_API_KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  

MCP Server Registration

Register the Asta MCP server with your host before installing the skill.

Claude Code

claude mcp add -t http -s user asta https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1 \
  -H "x-api-key: $ASTA_API_KEY"

Then restart Claude Code so the MCP tools load at session start.

Codex CLI

Edit ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.asta]
type = "http"
url = "https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1"
headers = { "x-api-key" = "${ASTA_API_KEY}" }

Cursor / Windsurf / Hermes / other MCP clients

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "asta": {
      "serverUrl": "https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "<YOUR_API_KEY>" }
    }
  }
}

Skill Installation

Claude Code

# Global (available in all projects)
git clone https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill.git ~/.claude/skills/asta-skill

# Project-level
git clone https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill.git .claude/skills/asta-skill

Codex

git clone https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill.git ~/.codex/skills/asta-skill

OpenClaw

git clone https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill.git ~/.openclaw/skills/asta-skill

# Project-level
git clone https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill.git skills/asta-skill

SkillsMP

skills install asta-skill

Installation paths summary

Usage

Just describe what you want:

> Use Asta to get the paper with DOI 10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762

> Search Asta for recent papers on mixture-of-experts at NeurIPS since 2023

> Who cited "Attention Is All You Need"? Show me the top 20 by citation count

> Find snippets in the Asta corpus that mention "flash attention latency"

> Look up Yann LeCun on Asta and list his 2024 papers

The skill picks the right Asta tool, attaches safe fields, and follows the documented workflow patterns.

Available Asta Tools

Files

• SKILL.md — the only required file. Loaded by all hosts as the skill instructions.
• README.md — this file (English, displayed on GitHub homepage)
• README_CN.md — Chinese documentation

Verification

After registering the MCP server and restarting your host, ask:

"Use Asta to get the paper ARXIV:1706.03762 with fields title,year,authors,venue,tldr"

A successful call returns Attention Is All You Need, NeurIPS 2017, Vaswani et al., with TLDR.

FAQ

Why do I need this skill if Asta is already an MCP server?

The MCP server gives your agent raw tools (function names + parameter schemas). The skill gives your agent the expertise to use them well. Without the skill, the agent must figure everything out from scratch each session:

Concretely, the skill adds:

1. Intent → tool mapping — which of the 8 tools to call for "find papers about X" vs. "who cited paper Y"
2. Context-overflow protection — warns agents to never request fields=citations (a single high-citation paper returns 200k+ characters)
3. Multi-step workflow patterns — topic discovery, seed-paper expansion, author deep-dive, evidence retrieval
4. Parallel batching guidance — prefer get_paper_batch over N sequential get_paper calls
5. Safe fields defaults — curated field list that prevents context blowups
6. Consistent output formatting — tables, counts, follow-up menus

Think of it like API documentation vs. the API itself: the schema tells the agent what's possible, the skill tells it what's wise.

Known Limitations

• fields=citations / fields=references blows up context — a single highly-cited paper returns 200k+ characters. Use the dedicated get_citations tool (which paginates) instead. The SKILL.md warns against this explicitly.
• API key required for production use — unauthenticated access hits strict rate limits fast
• Author disambiguation — common names collide; always inspect affiliations in search_authors_by_name before calling get_author_papers
• MCP loads at session start — if you register the server mid-session, restart your host to pick up the new tools
• Abstract availability — not every paper in the corpus has a full abstract; use snippet_search or tldr as fallback

Contributing

Suggestions, bug reports, and pull requests are all welcome! If you have ideas to improve this skill — new workflow patterns, better defaults, additional MCP host recipes, documentation fixes, or anything else — feel free to open an issue or submit a PR directly.

This skill is community-friendly: every contribution, no matter how small, helps make it better for everyone.

License

MIT

Support

If this skill helps you, consider supporting the author:

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Author

Agents365-ai

• Bilibili: https://space.bilibili.com/441831884
• GitHub: https://github.com/Agents365-ai