Best way to find recent papers in a special field of mathematics?

Question

My subjects of interest are Geometry of Banach spaces, renorming theory and fixed point theory. When I want to find recent papers in these fields of mathematics, mostly, I search name of paper, say, renorming of Banach spaces and applications in fixed point theory, in ScienceDirect and Google Scholar. So, if anyone knows the best way to find out recently paper in a special field of mathematics please do share.

Answer 1

The usual way to find papers on a given subject is to take one of them, and look at the references in it. Good modern databases allow you to to the inverse: to find the papers which cite this one. Very good databases which allow you to to this (and are quite complete) in mathematics are arXiv and Mathscinet, but Google Scholar also helps sometimes.

In this way, you can quickly find most of the relevant papers on a given math subject. Mathscinet has especially advanced search system: you can search on keywords in the title, keywords in the review itself, author name, and names in the reference list, and combine all of the above. The unique feature of Mathscinet is that it really identifies authors in most cases, even those with such names as Jones or Zhang. Arxiv has relatively poor search system, and (unfortunately) not everyone places his/her papers on the arxiv. But its great advantage, is that it gives you the most recent items, not yet published. For my own research I read the titles of all new entries in the arxiv in the area of principal interest, at least once per month. (In pre-Internet time, I read all titles in the corresponding chapter of Math Reviews).

It is somewhat more difficult to search old publications (of pre-computer and pre-Math Reviews era), publications which are not digitalized or poorly digitalized. Judging by the topics you list, this is not very important for you. But there exist tools which permit you to search even 19s century papers effectively.