Asta Skill

This is domain expertise for Ai2's Asta MCP server, which exposes Semantic Scholar's academic graph over HTTP. It maps user intents to the right tool (broad search vs. known DOI vs. citation traversal vs. author lookup), warns you about the critical pitfall (never request citations or references via the fields parameter or you'll blow your context window on highly cited papers), and documents safe field defaults. The skill also reveals that externalIds works despite being undocumented, which is handy when you need DOIs. Useful if you're building literature review agents or research assistants and want someone else to have debugged the workflow patterns and pagination traps first.

skills.sh installs: 3.1K
GitHub stars: 100
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add agents365-ai/365-skills --skill asta-skill --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Asta MCP: Academic Paper Search

Asta is Ai2's Scientific Corpus Tool: the Semantic Scholar academic graph exposed over MCP (streamable HTTP). This skill tells agents which Asta tool to call for which intent, how to keep responses small enough to read, and which failure modes are silent.

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, stateless (no session id, no server-side state between calls)
Behavior verified against: Asta MCP server v1.12.3, 2026-10-01

Prerequisite Check

Before invoking any tool, verify the Asta MCP server is registered in the host agent. Tool names are prefixed by the MCP server name chosen at install time (commonly asta__<tool> or mcp__asta__<tool>).

If no Asta tools are visible, do not make raw HTTP calls or invent results. Tell the user to register https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1 as a streamable HTTP MCP server with an x-api-key header, then restart/reload the host. Minimal setup hints:

SKILL.md on GitHub