Asta MCP — Academic Paper Search

Asta is Ai2's Scientific Corpus Tool, exposing the Semantic Scholar academic graph over MCP (streamable HTTP transport). This skill tells agents which Asta tool to call for which intent, and how to compose them into useful workflows.

MCP endpoint:
```
https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1
```
Auth:
```
x-api-key
```
header (request key at https://share.hsforms.com/1L4hUh20oT3mu8iXJQMV77w3ioxm)
Transport: streamable HTTP

Prerequisite Check

Before invoking any tool, verify the Asta MCP server is registered in the host agent. Tool names will be prefixed by the MCP server name chosen at install time (commonly

asta__<tool>

mcp__asta__<tool>

). If no Asta tools are visible, direct the user to the Installation section below.

Tool Map — Intent → Asta Tool

User intent	Asta tool	Notes
Broad topic search	`search_papers_by_relevance`	Supports venue + date filters
Known paper title	`search_paper_by_title`	Optional venue restriction
Known DOI / arXiv / PMID / CorpusId / MAG / ACL / SHA / URL	`get_paper`	Single-paper lookup
Multiple known IDs at once	`get_paper_batch`	Batch lookup — prefer over N sequential `get_paper` calls
Who cited paper X	`get_citations`	Citation traversal with filters, paginated
Find author by name	`search_authors_by_name`	Returns profile info
An author's publications	`get_author_papers`	Pass author id from previous call
Find passages mentioning X	`snippet_search`	~500-word excerpts from paper bodies

Search/citation tools accept publication_date_range
(format

YYYY-MM-DD:YYYY-MM-DD

; year shorthand like

"2021:"

":2015-01"

"2015:2020"

is also accepted) and venues
(comma-separated) filters, plus fields
for field selection — pass them whenever the user's intent constrains scope (e.g., "recent", "since 2022", "at NeurIPS").

⚠️

fields

parameter — avoid context blowups

get_paper

get_paper_batch

accept a

fields

string. Never request
citations
or
references
via

fields

— a single highly-cited paper (e.g. Attention Is All You Need) returns 200k+ characters and will overflow the agent's context window. Use the dedicated

get_citations

tool for forward citations (it paginates). Asta does not provide a dedicated

get_references

tool — to retrieve a paper's reference list, use

get_paper

with

fields=references

only for papers you know have a small reference list (typically < 100).

Safe default

fields

for

get_paper

title,year,authors,venue,tldr,url,abstract

Add

journal

publicationDate

fieldsOfStudy

isOpenAccess

only when needed.

Retrieving DOI / external IDs (undocumented but supported)

Asta's official

fields

list does not include

externalIds

, but the field is transparently passed through to the underlying Semantic Scholar API and works in practice. Add

externalIds

fields

to retrieve

DOI

PubMed

PubMedCentral

ArXiv

MAG

DBLP

CorpusId

. Caveats:

Not all papers have a DOI — pure arXiv preprints often only return
```
ArXiv
```
+
```
CorpusId
```
.
```
get_paper("DOI:...")
```
lookup is not 100% reliable; some valid DOIs return
```
not found
```
. Prefer searching by title first, then reading
```
externalIds
```
off the result.
Since this is undocumented, treat it as best-effort and degrade gracefully if a future Asta release drops it.

Workflow Patterns

Pattern 1 — Topic Discovery

```
search_papers_by_relevance(keyword, publication_date_range="<current_year-5>:", venues=?)
```
→ initial hits (compute the lower bound from today's date — e.g., in 2026 pass
```
publication_date_range="2021:"
```
; adjust or drop the filter if the user asks for older work)
Rank/present top N by citationCount + recency
Offer follow-ups:
```
get_citations
```
on the most influential, or
```
snippet_search
```
for specific claims

Pattern 2 — Seed-Paper Expansion

```
get_paper(DOI|arXiv|...)
```
→ verify seed
```
get_citations(paperId)
```
→ forward expansion
Optionally
```
search_papers_by_relevance
```
with seed title terms for sideways discovery
Deduplicate by paperId before presenting

Pattern 3 — Author Deep-Dive

```
search_authors_by_name(name)
```
→ pick correct profile (disambiguate by affiliation)
```
get_author_papers(authorId)
```
→ full publication list
Filter client-side by topic keywords or date

Pattern 4 — Evidence Retrieval

```
snippet_search(claim_query)
```
→ find passages making/supporting a claim
For each hit, optionally
```
get_paper(id)
```
for full metadata

Output & Interaction Rules

Always report total count and which tool was used.
Present top 10 as a table (title, year, venue, citations), then details for the most relevant.
If the user writes in Chinese, present summaries in Chinese; keep titles in original language.
After results, offer: Details / Refine / Citations / Snippet / Export / Done.

Critical Rules

Prefer batched intent over ping-pong. If the user's question needs two independent lookups, issue them as parallel MCP tool calls in one turn, not sequentially.
Never guess IDs. If a user gives a fuzzy title, use
```
search_paper_by_title
```
before
```
get_paper
```
.
Respect rate limits. An API key buys higher limits but not unlimited — stop expanding citation graphs beyond what the user asked for.
Do not fabricate fields. If Asta returns null
```
abstract
```
or
```
venue
```
, say so rather than inventing.

Handling Asta responses

Situation	What to do
Empty `abstract`	Not all corpus papers have full text — use `snippet_search` , or fall back to title + TLDR
Author disambiguation uncertain	Inspect affiliations in `search_authors_by_name` results before calling `get_author_papers`
`429 Too Many Requests`	Back off; batch with `get_paper_batch` instead of sequential `get_paper` calls
Need DOI / PubMed ID / arXiv ID	Add `externalIds` to `fields` (see "Retrieving DOI" above); fall back to `ArXiv` ID when `DOI` is absent

asta-skill

NPX Install

Tags

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