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,publicationDateGenerate a BibTeX entry from the result. Conventions:
- Key:
{firstAuthorSurname}{year}lowercased, ASCII only (e.g.,wei2022). Append a letter for conflicts (wei2022a). corpus_id: Includecorpus_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.