Generalized Stieltjes transforms: basic aspects

The paper surveys the basic properties of generalized Stieltjes functions including some new ones. We introduce the notion of the exact Stieltjes order and give a criterion of exactness, simple sufficient conditions and some prototypical examples. The paper includes an appendix, where we define the left sided Riemann-Liouville and the right sided Kober-Erdelyi fractional integrals of measures supported on half axis and give inversion formulas for them.