Can I ask for recent research papers?

Question

Suppose I am a novice student in a field of theoretical CS.

Is it allowed to ask for recent research papers from reputed journals to study?

Answer 1

In principle, questions about what's going on in a small subfield fit into the reference-request tag and can be on-topic. (More about this tag.)

A couple of potential pitfalls are:

• Is it something it would make sense to ask your doctoral adviser instead? I think we do want to encourage students to communicate well with their advisers.

• Is the area narrow enough? For instance,

What's new important work in complexity theory

might be considered primarily opinion-based, but

Are there any recent papers (last five years) on 1-counter automata

is more fact-based. In that case, however, there's the question

• Is your question easily answerable using a Google search?

So to summarize, a good question of this kind should be fact-based, answerable, but not easily answerable by a Google search or by your doctoral adviser.