Nasa Ads MCP server

@pipeworx/nasa-ads

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

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Tools

full ADS query syntax (author:"Rubin, V", year:2020-2024, bibstem:ApJ, abs:"phrase", property:refereed).

• adssearch(query, sort?, limit?, start?, includeabstract?) — search the literature with the

identifier form is detected and searched in the right field, so a DOI never silently free-text matches an unrelated paper.

• ads_paper(identifier) — the full record for one paper by bibcode, DOI or arXiv id. The

(citations, default) or its bibliography (references).

• ads_citations(bibcode, direction?, sort?, limit?, start?) — papers citing this one

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 then Settings → API Token ().

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

Data sources

with a different q. ads_citations uses ADS's own citations(bibcode:...) and references(bibcode:...) operators rather than a separate endpoint.

• — every tool here is one call to this endpoint

Traps

year — a clean 200 that looks like a stripped result set. Every call here sends an explicit field list.

• fl is not optional in practice. Omit it and ADS returns bare ids with no title, author or

author:"Rubin, V" is. A free-text match returns plausible, wrong papers with no error, so the zero-result note says this explicitly.

• Unquoted author names are searched as free text. author:Rubin is not an author search;

padding to reflowing matches nothing, which is indistinguishable from "this paper is not indexed".

• 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

citations result is ordinary; so is an unknown bibcode. Both return zero rather than an error, so the note names both causes.

• Zero citations is usually real. For a paper published in the last few months an empty

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nasa-ads": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nasa-ads/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nasa-ads/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.