@pipeworx/nasa-ads

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nasa-ads/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

No MCP client? Skip the connection: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs {"query":"..."} to find a tool below, GET /v1/tools/<name> for its schema, POST the same URL with arguments for the data — see For AI agents.

Tools: 3

The NASA Astrophysics Data System — essentially the complete bibliography of astronomy and astrophysics since 1823, with hand-curated citation and reference graphs.

Tools

• ads_search(query, sort?, limit?, start?, include_abstract?) — search the literature with the full ADS query syntax (author:"Rubin, V", year:2020-2024, bibstem:ApJ, abs:"phrase", property:refereed).
• ads_paper(identifier) — the full record for one paper by bibcode, DOI or arXiv id. The identifier form is detected and searched in the right field, so a DOI never silently free-text matches an unrelated paper.
• ads_citations(bibcode, direction?, sort?, limit?, start?) — papers citing this one (citations, default) or its bibliography (references).

Auth

BYO only. Pass _apiKey. There is no keyless path: ADS Bearer-authenticates every endpoint and an unauthenticated request is a flat 401 Missing "Authorization" in headers (verified 2026-09-17). The refusal says “requires an API key” so a caller is not left reading a 401 as our outage.

The token is free and generous: create an account at https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ then Settings → API Token (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/user/settings/token).

Platform fallback: PLATFORM_ADS_TOKEN. Until that secret is set, the pack-manifest entry carries byoExpected: true; remove it in the same change that lands the value.

Data sources

• https://api.adsabs.harvard.edu/v1/search/query — every tool here is one call to this endpoint with a different q. ads_citations uses ADS’s own citations(bibcode:...) and references(bibcode:...) operators rather than a separate endpoint.

Traps

• fl is not optional in practice. Omit it and ADS returns bare ids with no title, author or year — a clean 200 that looks like a stripped result set. Every call here sends an explicit field list.
• Unquoted author names are searched as free text. author:Rubin is not an author search; author:"Rubin, V" is. A free-text match returns plausible, wrong papers with no error, so the zero-result note says this explicitly.
• Year ranges are year:2020-2024. year>2020 is a syntax error.
• A bibcode is exactly 19 characters, dot-padded (2015ApJ...808...50A). A copy that lost its padding to reflowing matches nothing, which is indistinguishable from “this paper is not indexed”.
• Zero citations is usually real. For a paper published in the last few months an empty citations result is ordinary; so is an unknown bibcode. Both return zero rather than an error, so the note names both causes.

Tools

• ads_search — Search the NASA Astrophysics Data System — the complete bibliography of astronomy and
• ads_paper — Full record for one paper by bibcode, DOI or arXiv id — title, every author, journal,
• ads_citations — Papers that cite a given paper, or the papers it cites — the ADS citation graph, which is