ABSTRACT
In the age of the Internet, it is necessary to preface a chapter on secondary literature with a few words of caution. Without doubt, the Internet has revolutionized and simplified the search for information in many everyday situations. However, despite its obvious advantages, this new tool is of limited service for literary studies, and it is important to be aware of these limitations before using the Internet as a source for scholarly research. Only a very small percentage of scholarly works, such as certain primary texts, monographs, or articles, are accessible on the Internet; most are still published solely in print. Even though there are journals that appear in an additional electronic version, many of them are available online for registered users only (i.e., your university has to subscribe to the specific service). The same holds true for other large databases of primary literary texts. The consequence for literary scholars is that they still have to do the bulk of their research in libraries, not in cyberspace. If professors consider research papers with sources taken predominantly from the Internet to be amateurish and untrustworthy, this does not necessarily mean that they oppose current technological developments on principle. It is much more likely that their negative evaluation of a student's work is due to its lack of scholarly foundation and insufficient research into secondary sources for the paper.
