[Mvhsz]

Try to find a survey paper or review article [1] on the field you're interested in. They summarize the current state of the art in a field and link to the relevant papers. If the linked papers are behind a pay wall then you can use arXiv as recommended in another comment by searching the title/authors. The field usually wouldn't be as broad as "databases" but you could probably find one on "distributed wide column stores". I think they're usually published by grad students before they pick their thesis topic.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_article

[frayesto]

You can also go here for almost all papers

https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go