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> 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>" }.

Tool Map — Intent → Asta Tool