Trawling through some older messages on cosmology, I happened across this one. It's an area where theories come and go, where speculation (hopefully scientifically based!) is rife. Is there an easy way to track recent thinking on articles such as that quoted? Or is it just a matter of religiously scouring the scientific press for the latest theories? Just what *is* the latest accepted theory on superstrings?
It does seem very much 'theory of the week' environment at times!
The best way I've found to keep up to date with things is to subscribe to a magazine or listen to podcasts. Sky&Telescope will get around to mentioning things like this but it can take a while and only gets a small mention. Something like Nature will give you more detail, but its not just about astronomy. Personally I listen to the Nature and New Scientist podcast (free from their websites) regularly to try to keep up with what current thinking and discoveries are.
If you want to take things a bit more seriously you might want to join the Royal Astronomical Society. Their regular magazine Astronomy & Geophysics covers topics in some depth and the Monthly Notices (which cost more in print but are available online to members) is the main journal.
For more detail you can search in
www.arxiv.org/find
. This site stores journal articles that have been submitted to professional journals, though they are the versions that were submitted not necessarily the versions that were accepted (ApJ etc. want you to pay for those usually). A search for CSL-1 finds 7 documents so if you are prepared to read through the detailed subject matter and the mathematics you can! Searching for the word 'review' in the title field can also
The Abstract Data Search is also useful as it points to the actual journal versions (some of which may be free to download)
adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html
. This is most useful if you have free access to all the journals through a college, otherwise it can just be frustrating!
Those two 'search engines' are more for research work though. You can spend a lot of time hunting down the best articles and sorting the wheat from the chaff. Not really ideal for just finding out the latest thinking.
  