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:

| Platform | Status | Details | |----------|--------|---------| | Claude Code | ✅ Full support | Native SKILL.md + claude mcp add registration | | Codex | ✅ Full support | MCP entry in ~/.codex/config.toml | | Cursor / Windsurf / Hermes | ✅ Full support | Standard mcpServers JSON block | | opencode | ✅ Full support | Native skills + MCP in ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json | | OpenClaw/ClawHub | ✅ Full support | metadata.openclaw namespace + MCP config | | pi-mono | ✅ Full support | metadata.pimo namespace | | SkillsMP | ✅ Indexed | GitHub topics configured | | LM Studio | ⚠️ Manual | MCP tools work (0.3.17+); skill instructions must be pasted into the system prompt |

Comparison

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

| Capability | semanticscholar-skill | asta-skill | |---|---|---| | Transport | Python + direct REST (s2.py) | MCP (streamable HTTP) | | Host requirement | Python + S2_API_KEY | Host with MCP support | | Auth variable | S2_API_KEY | ASTA_API_KEY (via x-api-key) | | Best for | Scripted batch workflows, custom filters | Zero-code agent integration | | Works in Cursor / Windsurf out of the box | ❌ | ✅ |

vs. no skill (native agent)

| Feature | Native agent | This skill | |---|---|---| | Knows Asta endpoint & x-api-key header | ❌ | ✅ | | Intent → tool decision table | ❌ | ✅ | | Workflow patterns (discovery / seed expansion / author / evidence) | ❌ | ✅ | | Warns against context-blowing fields=citations | ❌ | ✅ | | Install recipes for every MCP host | ❌ | ✅ |

Prerequisites

• An agent host with MCP support (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, opencode, OpenClaw/ClawHub, pi-mono, 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>" }
    }
  }
}

LM Studio (manual mode)

LM Studio (0.3.17+) speaks MCP but does not auto-discover Agent Skills. Use it in two steps:

1. Register the MCP server — App Settings → Program → Integrations → edit mcp.json:

   {
     "mcpServers": {
       "asta": {
         "url": "https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1",
         "headers": { "x-api-key": "YOUR_ASTA_API_KEY" }
       }
     }
   }
   

2. Paste the skill instructions — copy the body of SKILL.md into the chat's System Prompt so the model follows the intent routing and safe defaults.

Use a tool-calling-capable local model (e.g. Qwen2.5-Instruct, Llama 3.1 Instruct, Mistral Nemo, GPT-OSS). Plain chat models cannot invoke MCP tools.

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/ClawHub

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

pi-mono

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

SkillsMP

skills install asta-skill

Installation paths summary

| Platform | Global path | Project path | |----------|-------------|--------------| | Claude Code | ~/.claude/skills/asta-skill/ | .claude/skills/asta-skill/ | | Codex | ~/.codex/skills/asta-skill/ | N/A | | OpenClaw/ClawHub | ~/.openclaw/skills/asta-skill/ | skills/asta-skill/ | | pi-mono | ~/.pimo/skills/asta-skill/ | — | | SkillsMP | N/A (installed via CLI) | N/A |

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

| Tool | Purpose | |---|---| | get_paper | Single-paper lookup by any supported ID | | get_paper_batch | Batch lookup of multiple IDs in one call | | search_papers_by_relevance | Broad keyword search with venue + date filters | | search_paper_by_title | Title-based lookup | | get_citations | Paginated citation traversal | | search_authors_by_name | Author profile search | | get_author_papers | All papers by a given author | | snippet_search | ~500-word passages from paper bodies |

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:

| Layer | What it provides | |-------|-----------------| | MCP server | 8 callable tools with input/output schemas | | This skill | Intent routing, safe defaults, workflow patterns, pitfall warnings |

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:

Author

Agents365-ai

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