asta-skill
Domain expertise for Ai2 Asta MCP tools (Semantic Scholar corpus). Intent-to-tool routing, safe defaults, workflow patterns, and pitfall warnings for academic paper search, citation traversal, and author discovery.
Install via CLI (Recommended)
clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/agents365-ai/asta-skillAsta MCP â 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-keyheader (request key at https://share.hsforms.com/1L4hUh20oT3mu8iXJQMV77w3ioxm) - Transport: streamable HTTP
Update Notifications
If <skill_directory>/.last_version_check is missing or >24h old, fetch the version from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Agents365-ai/asta-skill/main/SKILL.md, compare to the local version, then write the current Unix timestamp to .last_version_check. If remote is newer, tell the user once: ðĒ asta-skill X.Y.Z â A.B.C. Run 'git -C <skill_directory> pull' to update. Silently skip on any failure. Never run git pull yourself.
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, direct the user to the Installation section below.
Tool Map â Intent â 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 â 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 â pass them whenever the user's intent constrains scope (e.g., "recent", "since 2022", "at NeurIPS").
â ïļ fields parameter â avoid context blowups
get_paper / get_paper_batch accept a fields string. Never request citations or references via fields â 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 â 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).
Metadata
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Find the right skillPaste this into your clawhub.json to enable this plugin.
{
"plugins": {
"official-agents365-ai-asta-skill": {
"enabled": true,
"auto_update": true
}
}
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