papers

When it comes to the latest papers in science and engineering, there are a couple of good places to search and get information about the recently published stuff.

http://journals.iop.org/ is a good place to start. The latest papers are available to read for free, for the first month. Otherwise, you can take the titles and authors of interest to you and run them through the more general search engines named by Chris, in hopes of finding a free copy .

IEEE is not overly generous with information, but some abstracts may be available through IEEE explore without being registered as a member. Try browsing journals and magazines at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/guesthome.jsp

another decent source for the latest, hottest topics in peer-reviewed papers is Science: select your subject of interest at http://www.sciencemag.org/collections/subject/ to read the title and author for your search, maybe a brief summary if you're lucky, and links to related resources which are available online, including abstracts and more as in this example. The full text is not free.

The Public Library of Science publishes scientific papers online which are freely available for everyone to read. The range of subjects is not so complete, unfortunately. Public Library of Engineering, anyone?