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:

• Codex CLI: add [mcp_servers.asta] url = "https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1" and env_http_headers = { "x-api-key" = "ASTA_API_KEY" } to ~/.codex/config.toml.
• Claude Code: run claude mcp add -t http -s user asta https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1 -H "x-api-key: $ASTA_API_KEY".
• Generic MCP clients: configure server URL https://asta-tools.allen.ai/mcp/v1 with header { "x-api-key": "<YOUR_API_KEY>" }.