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Asta Literature Reports

Asta Literature Reports

github.com/allenaiProductivity420 installsUpdated 1d ago
Repository

About Asta Literature Reports

Asta Literature Reports is a skill for creating or updating cited literature reviews as Markdown documents. It guides paper discovery, report-file selection, BibTeX entry handling, and citation verification.

Key features

  1. 01Create or update Markdown reports
  2. 02Check existing search results first
  3. 03Use citations linked to BibTeX keys
  4. 04Add paper metadata to a bibliography
  5. 05Verify citations with Preview

Use cases

  1. 01Start a literature review in a visible project location
  2. 02Update an existing report while preserving its structure
  3. 03Cite papers found through literature searches
  4. 04Check that report citations resolve

Install

Copy the command and run it in a terminal.

$npx skills add https://github.com/allenai/asta-plugins --skill asta-literature-reports

After installing, type/asta-literature-reportsin Claude Code to confirm it loaded.

Details

From the project README

Literature Reports

Create or update literature reviews/reports as markdown documents with citations.

Finding Papers

  • Check .asta/literature/find/ for existing search results before running new searches.
  • Use the Find Literature skill for comprehensive searches and for the result schema and jq access patterns.
  • Use the Semantic Scholar Lookup skill for targeted queries: specific papers, citations, and author searches.

Workflow Guidance

  • Identify or create the report file first. Check if there's an existing report to update. New reports go in user-visible locations (e.g., docs/), not inside .asta/.
  • When updating an existing report, read it first to understand the current structure and content.
  • When using Find Literature results, go through ALL highly relevant papers — extract relevance criteria, snippets, and citation contexts from each.

Citation Conventions

YAML frontmatter — required for citation resolution:

---
bibliography: ../references.bib
---

Citations: Use [@key] format. Every key must exist in the .bib file — unresolved keys won't render.

Adding papers to .bib: As you cite a paper, fetch its metadata and append a BibTeX entry:

asta papers get CorpusId:<id> --fields title,authors,year,venue,externalIds,journal,publicationDate

Generate a BibTeX entry from the result. Conventions:

  • Key: {firstAuthorSurname}{year} lowercased, ASCII only (e.g., wei2022). Append a letter for conflicts (wei2022a).
  • corpus_id: Include corpus_id = {<id>} for stable identification (survives key renames).
  • Append to the .bib — never rewrite existing entries.

Verification: Use the Preview skill to render and verify all citations resolve.

Comments

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