I can't seem to find an official source that explains to me how to do an annotated bibliography - my Little Brown Handbook doesn't even mention it.
So, does anyone know of any good examples of this? Do I simply discuss each source after I list the information? I'm confused.
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
That's what I thought, just put a short paragraph explaining what you got out of each source.
Hobbes Posted by advice for robots (Member # 2544) on :
A bilbiography?
Might have to contact the Tolkein estate for that one. Posted by Annie (Member # 295) on :
hee hee. Apparently I can't type on 3 hours of sleep.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
The format may differ, so if your prof has a preference you should find out. But the information is usually as follows:
2) A brief (1-3 paragraphs) synopsis of the material. If it's a research report, you would want to include specifics about the subject population (college students, lab rats, etc.) If it's in a different academic discipline, there are probably some standard things you'd want to capture (period in history, classification of art, whatever). Then you talk about the author's conclusions. You can give your own opinion in this as well, but if you do, you should make it plain that you are doing so. Don't switch from "abstracting" the document to commenting on it without being VERY obvious. I usually stated my opinions in a separate paragraph at the end of my abstract. Or created a separate heading for "opinion" as opposed to "abstract or summary."
3) if this is to be used in a database, some key words might also be helpful. Things that you could use later to look up this (and similar) article and retrieve the information.
4) Again, if this is to be put in a database, you might want to add a separate section for things like # of references, how you found the article (e.g., referenced by Smith et al. 1998), and maybe even a cross-indexing thing that would work like key words/concepts, but at a somewhat more abstract level...
It'd help to have a format first.
It'd obviously help to know if this stuff is intended for a database or if you are just doing this as a paper exercise to learn how to do annotated bibliographies.
Posted by Annie (Member # 295) on :
Wow! Thanks!
It's for an art history paper, and the citations are in-text, MLA style. I think he's having us annotate it just so he knows we're not just listing sources to fll our requirements.
Posted by Jeni (Member # 1454) on :
I'd ask before you go through all that writing. I had to do one last semester, and the professor only wanted a sentence or two, not full paragraphs.
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
My final paper for Roman history, instead of being a paper, was an annotated bibliography with thirty sources and 600-800 words for each citation. I thoroughly enjoyed that.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
My opinion is that I would mention what about that source is relevant to my paper.
Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
I would definitely get some further direction from the prof. It seems like there's enough room for doubt and I'd hate to see you do way too much work just because you took my format and used it.
Or, conversely, if you did the wrong thing (synopsizing without giving your opinion) or whatever.
The point of an annotated bibliography, to me, was that I could later scan my entries and recall the paper without having to re-read it (unless I was going to cite it in detail in a per). So I always put in enough detail to allow me to cite that same article not just for the project I was working on currently, but for, perhaps, some future different project as well.
Posted by littlemissattitude (Member # 4514) on :
Well, all of the annotated bibliographies I've had to do have needed at least a short paragraph, after the bibliographical information, to explain what the source was about and how it will be relevant to the paper you are writing. In one case, we were required to do a paraphrase of relevant information from half the sources, and exact quotes from half the sources, and to submit a copy of the page or pages for the paraphrased sources so that the professor could see that we were actually paraphrasing, and not embellishing on what the source really said.
And, yes, I too suspected that the professors requiring them just wanted to make sure we were really at least skimming the sources rather than just listing them. However, I found having to prepare them before the actual paper was written to be very helpful in remembering what information was in which source when I sat down to write the paper.
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