asta-skill — Semantic Scholar via Ai2 Asta MCP

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A pure instruction-pack skill that turns natural-language research questions into well-formed calls against Ai2's Asta MCP server (Semantic Scholar). Routes intent → tool, fills safe defaults, chains workflows, and warns you off the usual pitfalls. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Hermes, opencode, OpenClaw, pi-mono, and any agent compatible with the Agent Skills format.

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 on any host that speaks MCP and loads Agent Skills — verified on Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Hermes, opencode, OpenClaw/ClawHub, and pi-mono; indexed on SkillsMP. LM Studio (0.3.17+) supports MCP but does not auto-load skills — paste SKILL.md into the system prompt (see LM Studio (manual mode) below).

SKILL.md's frontmatter keeps only name, description, and license at the top level (all other fields are nested under metadata), so it validates cleanly under stricter skill-frontmatter parsers such as Codex's.

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

Installation

Two steps — register the MCP server first, then install the skill.

Step 1: Register the Asta MCP Server

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]
url = "https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1"
env_http_headers = { "x-api-key" = "ASTA_API_KEY" }

Codex infers streamable HTTP from url. env_http_headers maps the header name to the env var name to read its value from — so export ASTA_API_KEY in your shell. For a hardcoded key instead, use http_headers = { "x-api-key" = "<YOUR_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>" }
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop's built-in Add custom connector UI only supports OAuth — it can't attach the x-api-key header Asta needs, so a server added there fails to register. Register Asta through the config file using the mcp-remote bridge instead (requires Node.js).

Edit claude_desktop_config.json (macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/, Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "asta": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1",
        "--header",
        "x-api-key:${ASTA_API_KEY}"
      ],
      "env": { "ASTA_API_KEY": "<YOUR_API_KEY>" }
    }
  }
}

Write the header as x-api-key:${ASTA_API_KEY} with no space after the colon — Claude Desktop splits --header args on spaces — and supply the value via env. Then fully quit and reopen Claude Desktop. Note that Claude Desktop does not auto-load filesystem Agent Skills: the MCP tools work directly once connected, and to add the skill's intent routing / safe defaults, paste the body of skills/asta-skill/SKILL.md into a Project's instructions (same as LM Studio below).

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 skills/asta-skill/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.

Step 2: Install the Skill

The skill body lives at skills/asta-skill/SKILL.md. The easiest path is the plugin marketplace.

Plugin marketplace (recommended)

# Any agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.)
npx skills add Agents365-ai/365-skills -g

# Claude Code only
/plugin marketplace add Agents365-ai/365-skills
/plugin install asta

Also indexed on SkillsMP and ClawHub — each handles updates through its own marketplace.

Manual clone (any host)

git clone https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill.git /tmp/asta-skill
cp -r /tmp/asta-skill/skills/asta-skill <your-host's-skills-dir>/asta-skill

Verification

After registering the MCP server, installing the skill, 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.

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.

Example: Search + Batch Download (chained with paper-fetch)

asta-skill only handles search and metadata; it does not download PDFs. To go from a search query to local PDFs, chain it with a paper-fetch skill (or any DOI-based downloader of your choice):

> Use Asta to find the 5 most cited papers on "single-cell ATAC-seq batch correction"
  since 2022, then hand the DOIs to paper-fetch to download all PDFs into ./papers/

What happens under the hood:

1. asta-skill → search_papers_by_relevance with publication_date_range="2022:" and fields=title,year,authors,venue,tldr,externalIds (note externalIds to expose DOI)
2. Agent extracts externalIds.DOI for each hit; falls back to externalIds.ArXiv when DOI is absent
3. paper-fetch → batch-resolves each DOI/arXiv ID through the Unpaywall → Semantic Scholar → arXiv → PubMed Central → bioRxiv/medRxiv → publisher-direct → Sci-Hub fallback chain
4. PDFs land in ./papers/, one per paper

paper-fetch is a separate skill — install it if you need download capability. asta-skill itself stays scoped to the Semantic Scholar corpus.

Step 1 — Asta returns the top 5 papers with DOIs:

Step 2 — paper-fetch downloads all 5 PDFs into ./papers/:

🔗 Related Skills

Part of the Agents365-ai research-skill family — pick the right tool for the job:

Skill	Niche	When to use
semanticscholar-skill	Direct Semantic Scholar API (Python)	When MCP isn't available or you prefer scripted access
paper-fetch	DOI → PDF, 7-source fallback	When you need full text after finding citations
scholar-deep-research	8-phase literature review pipeline	When the user wants a structured cited report

💬 Community

Join us for help, Q&A, and updates:

• Discord: https://discord.gg/79JF5Atuk
• WeChat: scan the QR code below

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👤 Author

Agents365-ai

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

📄 License

MIT