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Asta MCP Academic Paper Search Skill

Routing and safe-defaults playbook for Ai2's Asta MCP (Semantic Scholar) tools, covering paper search, citation traversal, and author discovery.

EducationIntermediate★ 179⑂ 5AI score 9/10Last updated: Jul 16, 2026

What it does

  • Maps research intents (topic search, title/DOI lookup, forward citations, author lookup, evidence snippets) to the correct Asta MCP tool.
  • Documents per-tool parameter quirks: get_author_papers uses paper_fields (not fields), get_citations rejects venues, snippet_search uses inserted_before and comma-separated paper_ids.
  • Prevents context blowups: never request citations/references via fields, and override the large default limits (1000 author papers, 100 citations, 50 search hits, 20 snippets).
  • Ships field presets for metadata lookup, ranking tables, and DOI/export handoff, plus four workflows: topic discovery, seed-paper expansion, author deep-dive, and evidence retrieval.
  • Adds output rules (name the tool used, table of up to 10 results, offer follow-ups) and response handling for 429s, null abstracts, and fuzzy date filters.

Who it's for

  • Researchers, grad students, and R&D engineers doing literature reviews.
  • Users of MCP-capable hosts (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf) with the Asta server registered.
  • Anyone automating citation-graph exploration or author disambiguation.

Example uses

  1. "Show 20 mixture-of-experts routing papers since 2023 ranked by citations" → search_papers_by_relevance with a date range and citationCount in fields.
  2. "Find follow-up work citing this arXiv paper" → get_paper to verify the seed, then get_citations with a small limit and paperId dedupe.
  3. "Get this author's h-index and recent publications" → search_authors_by_name with ORCID/hIndex fields explicitly requested, then get_author_papers(limit=50).

· · · Install guide · · ·

Try it now, no install

Paste this into Claude to use the skill without installing anything.

Read the instructions in this file and follow them to help me:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill/HEAD/skills/asta-skill/SKILL.md

What I want: (describe your task here)

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↓ If it works for you, download the ZIP below and install it. Then it runs on its own — no pasting each time.

Install in the Claude app (no terminal)
  1. Download the ZIP with the button below.
  2. In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
  3. Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the ZIP.
↓ Download ZIP
Install in Claude Code

Let Claude do it — paste this into Claude Code

Install the skill I found on Claude Skill Mart.
Copy the skills/asta-skill folder from the GitHub repo Agents365-ai/asta-skill into my ~/.claude/skills/asta-skill/.
When it's done, tell me in one line what this skill can do.

Install with a command instead

git clone https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill.git && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r asta-skill/skills/asta-skill ~/.claude/skills/asta-skill

⚠ This is a third-party skill. Check the source repository before installing.

  1. Request an Asta API key using the form linked in the skill.
  2. Export it in your shell: export ASTA_API_KEY="your_key" (add to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc to persist).
  3. Register the MCP server: claude mcp add -t http -s user asta https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1 -H "x-api-key: $ASTA_API_KEY"
  4. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill.git
  5. Install the skill: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r asta-skill/skills/asta-skill ~/.claude/skills/asta-skill
  6. Restart Claude Code and run /mcp to confirm the asta tools are listed.
  7. Test with a prompt like "find recent papers on graph neural networks since 2022".
View source on GitHub ↗License: MIT