Legal Scholarship and Digital Publishing: Has Anything Changed in the Way We Do Legal Research? 21(2/3) Legal References Services Quarterly 105 (2002). “Legal scholarship depends on the existence and reliability of accessible materials to verify the accur

SUMMARY. Scholarship, including legal scholarship, depends on the reliability of sources used so that subsequent scholars can build upon the work. Reliability is here defined as including accurate access to sources that reproduce faithfully the original source. Legal scholarship depends on the existence and reliability of accessible materials to verify the accu-racy and validity of the ideas advanced in the source. The growth of digi-tal publishing,1 which includes both distributing information directly in electronic format and the conversion of paper materials into electronic format, threatens the established reliability of source materials. The cur-rent legal literature has failed to address this issue; the author’s examina-tion of 20 law review articles, all containing at least four citations to the Internet, found that 12 of the 20 contained an online source which coul