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).

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]
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 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 Unpaywall → arXiv → bioRxiv/medRxiv → PMC → SS → 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