Part of your research assignment may be to write an annotated bibliography, or you may decide to annotate your working bibliography to help you keep track of your ideas about your sources.

In an annotated bibliography, you summarize and evaluate the sources you have explored for your paper—at least the most promising ones. Writing brief sentences summarizing key points of a source will help you identify how the source relates to your argument and to your other sources and will help you judge whether the source is relevant and appropriate for your project. Clarifying your sources’ ideas will help you separate them from your own and from each other, and it will also help you move toward a draft in which you synthesize sources and present your own research thesis.

Sample annotated bibliography (Orlov; MLA)

Sample annotated bibliography (Haddad; APA)

Sample annotated bibliography (Niemeyer; APA)