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Writing Guide: Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Writing Guide: Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography gives you an opportunity to summarize, evaluate, and record publication information for your sources before drafting your research paper. You summarize each source to understand its main ideas; you evaluate each source for accuracy, quality, and relevance. Finally, you reflect, asking yourself how the source will contribute to your research project. (See the sample annotated bibliography entry in 52f. See also two complete annotated bibliographies, one written for a composition class and one for an economics class.)

Key features

A list of sources arranged in alphabetical order by author includes complete bibliographic information for each source.
A brief entry for each source is typically one hundred to two hundred words.
A summary of each source states the work’s main ideas and key points briefly and accurately. The summary is written in the third person and the present tense. Summarizing helps you test your understanding of a source and convey its meaning responsibly.
An evaluation of the source’s role and usefulness in your project includes an assessment of the source’s strengths and limitations, the author’s qualifications and expertise, and the function of the source in your project. Evaluating a source helps you analyze how the source fits into your project and separate the source’s ideas from your own.

Thinking ahead: Presenting or publishing

You may be asked to submit your annotated bibliography electronically. If this is the case, and if any of your sources are from the Web, you may want to format some of the text as hyperlinks to make it easier for your readers to access the sources if they need to do so.

Writing your annotated bibliography

Explore

For each source, begin by brainstorming responses to questions such as the following.

What is the purpose of the source? Who is its intended audience?
What is the author’s thesis? What evidence supports the thesis?
Do you agree or disagree with the author’s conclusions?
What qualifications and expertise does the author bring? Does the author have any biases or make any questionable assumptions?
Why do you think this source is useful for your project?
How does this source relate to the other sources in your bibliography?

Draft

Arrange the sources in alphabetical order by author (or by title for works with no author).
Provide consistent bibliographic information for each source. For the exact bibliographic format, see 56b (MLA), 61b (APA), or 63d (Chicago).
Start your summary by identifying the thesis and purpose of the source as well as the credentials of the source’s author.
Keep your research question in mind. How does this source contribute to your project? How does it help you take your place in the conversation?

Revise

Ask reviewers for specific feedback. Here are some questions to guide their comments.

Is each source summarized clearly? Have you identified the author’s main idea?
For each source, have you made a clear judgment about how and why the source is useful for your project?
Have you used quotation marks around exact words from a source?