Asta

Asta: Ai2's scientific research assistant that finds papers, summarizes literature with citations and runs data analysis.

Asta is the Allen Institute for AI's (Ai2) research assistant for scientists, launched on August 26, 2025. It finds relevant work in Semantic Scholar's index of more than 200 million papers, writes literature summaries with citations you can check, and in a limited beta runs basic analyses on your data. Asta is part of an open ecosystem from Ai2 that also includes AstaBench, a benchmark for scientific AI agents, and tools developers can build on. It is free, and researchers at nearly 200 institutions were already using it at launch.

Asta at a glance

Best for: Researcher, Student
Runs on: Web
Pricing: Free.
Released: August 2025
Category: AI research tool
Website: asta.allen.ai

Key features

Paper search across 200M+ papers
Literature summaries with citations
Data analysis agent (limited beta)
Built on Semantic Scholar
Open tools and the AstaBench benchmark

Use it for

Finding papers on a research question
Drafting a cited literature overview
Exploring a dataset for patterns

Alternatives to Asta

Scite — It uses direct publisher agreements to verify scientific claims with exact source links.
Elicit — It searches 138 million papers and automates systematic literature reviews.
Semantic Scholar — Search over 238 million papers across all fields of science.
Paper2Agent — It enables direct interaction with research papers and automatic result reproduction.
OpenResearch — Run parallel research workflows locally or on remote compute.
ResearchRabbit — Access over 310 million academic papers and map research fields visually.
Humata — It provides cited answers directly from your uploaded documents.
Sourcely — Access over 200 million academic papers and export citations instantly.
Undermind — Finds papers keyword search misses, with every claim cited
Feynman — Read papers, search the web, write research drafts, and cite claims.
AI Scientist v3 — Automates end-to-end scientific research from task descriptions to complete papers.
ASReview — It reduces the manual workload of large-scale text screening by up to 95%.

All Asta alternatives