I suppose most of you are familiar with the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC). Particularly, when submitting an article for publication one has to
choose appropriate classification codes.
But I am wondering if it does play a significant role in searching for
literature on a specific subject, e.g. through MathSciNet or ZBMATH.
Or do you prefer searching by subject terms?
Thank you very much!
Best Answer
At first, I thought this was a silly question, and it seemed highly implausible that searching by MSC code could actually be good for anything. Certainly it's a terrible way to find specific information, but I just gave it a try and it's quite a bit more useful than I thought. I put 52C17 in MathSciNet and got a list of 731 papers, and I've just been browsing through them and learning about a number of interesting papers I was unaware of. I should do this more often.
So my answer is that it's a waste of time if you're looking for anything in particular, but it can actually be a good way to get an overview of what's been happening recently in an area.