An annotated bibliography is a is a list of citations to books, articles, and other documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph.
Annotations are descriptive and critical. They discuss the author's point of view, clarity and appropriateness of expression,and authority.
Writing an annotated bibliography is a useful step in the paper-writing process because it requires you to read each article you found carefully so you can summarize the findings of the article and address how you might use the article in your research paper.
For this course, the annotation will consist of the following components:
Citation - Provides information to locate the source. The citation should be in MLA format.
Summary - Write one or two sentences about the thesis and main points of the source.
Assess - Is the argument presented by the author valid? Is it based on facts or is it merely opinions? Is there a bias in the source?
Reflection - Write one sentence discussing how this article is relevant to your research topic and will be incorporated into your paper.
Below is a example of an annotation used in the Humanities.
Sciences may differ than those in the Humanities. They may include a description of the methods used (how they conducted the experiments) and the results (what did they find). Below is an example of a scientific annotation.
