I suppose most of you are familiar with the [Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC)](http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/msc/msc2010.html). 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!



Do you use the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) when searching for literature?
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.


