Writing an Annotated Bibliography
A bibliography is a list of documents or other materials (books, articles, reports, visual or audio recordings, Web pages, etc.) relating to a specified subject. There are essentially two main types of bibliographies, both of which can be very valuable in locating information. The first is a list of materials someone has used while researching a paper, article, or book. This type of bibliography provides citations to works consulted and/or cited during the research process, gathered together at the end of the work produced, usually with the citations arranged alphabetically by the authors' last names. The second type of bibliography is a separate work that stands on its own, ranging in length from a less than a page to several pages to a book, that provides a list or lists of works addressing a particular topic. This kind of bibliography can be either selective (listing the best materials on a subject) or exhaustive (listing as many works as can be identified that address a subject).
An annotated bibliography is a bibliography in which each entry is accompanied by an annotation--a statement, ranging in length from a sentence or two to an entire paragraph, which may describe, explain, and evaluate each item. Not every bibliography that includes additional text is an annotated bibliography; sometimes abstracts rather than annotations are provided. An abstract is a brief summary of the text of a book, article, or other information source, usually without added interpretation or criticism. Annotations are related to abstracts. An annotation may begin with a brief abstract, but will often go on to include an assessment of the item's value or significance and then to offer comments or recommendations regarding its use.
Annotated bibliographies are most often used by scholars looking for materials on a particular topic. They help researchers find out about the extent of materials available, to get a sense of the items listed, to determine the quality or usefulness of different books, articles, and other resources for their work, and to make initial decisions about what to consult and when. If you have been given an assignment to create an annotated bibliography as a course requirement, be sure to check with your professor regarding the target audience and purpose for your annotated bibliography. To get a sense of the range of styles and formats for annotated bibliographies, take a look at the examples below.
Selecting sources: finding materials for your bibliography
Some questions to answer regarding selection of sources for your bibliography:
- Will the bibliography be selective (the best material on your topic) or comprehensive (all of the material on your topic)? Will it be somewhere in between selective and comprehensive (for example, all materials available at Lawrence)?
- Will you limit the material selected by publication dates? What might the justification be for these limits? Will significantly older material be relevant for your bibliography? Don't assume that it won't be . . . .
- Is the language in which your sources are or might be written a factor? How important will it be to acknowledge your (or your readers') relative fluency?
Your answers to these questions will also influence the approach you take to finding materials for your bibliography. For example, searching for sources for a comprehensive bibliography of books would require not only a search of the library's catalog, but also a search of WorldCat, a database of materials found in libraries world-wide. For help in finding materials for a bibliography, you might try the following:
- take a look at the Library Research Guides page for advice on finding materials for various subjects
- ask a reference librarian
- request a reference conference to schedule some time to meet with a reference librarian for an in-depth consultation.
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Examining sources: thinking about what to say in your annotations
You should always check with your professor to see if you need to have material in hand for evaluation, or if you can use information from library catalogs, indexes, abstracts, or other databases as a basis for your annotations. Follow your professor's guidelines in this regard. In general, it's best to be able to see the material in person in order to evaluate it thoroughly.
Some of the information you will need to properly cite a source is also important to look at in your selection and initial evaluation of works for your bibliography. See the library guides to Evaluation of Books and Articles and Citing Electronic Documents for explicit connections between citation and evaluation. The evaluation guide in particular will be helpful, as it points you toward resources that can help you answer questions regarding authors and publishers, like biographical encyclopedias or Books in Print. Among the citation information that will help you evaluate your material are the following considerations:
- Author: One, two or more? Is the person an author, editor, or both? Have you seen this name before at all? If the work is a collection, encyclopedia, or is in some other way made up of different parts, are authors listed for the parts? Is there an author listed at all? What is the author(s) connection to the subject? Does the work reflect a personal or a scholarly interest in the topic?
- Title: Is there a title? Remember, for encyclopedia articles, the title may be the entry word. Does the title tell you anything important about the work? Does it reflect the content? If you are evaluating an article, look at the title of the journal, magazine, or newspaper as well as the title of the article. Is this a publication you've heard of before? Is it supported by or affiliated with a particular organization, enterprise, or institution?
- Publisher: Is this a publishing name you've heard of before? Where is the publisher located? Is it a university press, commercial press, or some other kind of publisher?
- Date: When was the work published? How might the date of publication be reflected in the content? Is the work current enough for your purposes? For a journal, magazine, or newspaper, consider the volume number as well as the publication date. How long has this title been in publication? For a book, has this work been through more than one edition?
- Pages: Has the author given enough or too much space to the topic?
The following questions address information that goes beyond what you need for citations, but direct you toward additional considerations that will help with evaluation of sources. Many of these questions will be answered directly in the preface, introduction, or conclusion of a book, or in the abstract, introduction, or conclusion of an article. Others you will answer for yourself by reading, viewing, or listening to the item under evaluation. Look for the following:
- Format: What type of material is the source? A book? An article? A score? Selected or complete works? A recording or video? Why are materials of this type important to the topic at hand?
- Genre: What can you say about the genre or nature of the material? For example, is it a biography? Criticism or interpretation of another source? Primary material or secondary material? A literature review or a report of original research?
- Organization and structure: Does the arrangement make sense? Are there prefaces, introductions, chapters headings, indexes, charts, interesting images, or other features? Are there keys for any abbreviations?
- Scope: How much information does the work claim to cover? Is that reasonable? Does the work actually cover what it claims to?
- Audience: For what type of audience does the source seem to be intended? A general audience? Scholars or specialists? Performers? Is it written for a specific discipline or interdisciplinary in nature?
- Purpose: Is the purpose of the work stated or implied? Does the work live up to its purpose? Is the author responding to other theories or other writers? Is the work addressing a particular question or controversy? Is it extending, commenting on, or critiquing a line of reasoning or tradition within a given field?
- Bibliographic information: If the item at hand is a secondary source, what types of material were used in preparing the source? Does it draw on primary sources, secondary sources, or both? If the item at hand is a primary source, does it include supplementary materials, and does it document those materials? Does it provide information about any editorial decisions, and the sources used to make those decisions? Are citations or other information provided to document those decisions?
- Scholarly value: Is the source mentioned in other bibliographies, cited in other sources, or discussed in reference works? If you are preparing a selective bibliography, what makes this particular source essential for your research?
- Potential use: How would you use this source in writing a paper or developing a presentation on this topic? More specifically, you might want to think about how will you bring this source into play in answering a question or developing a thesis. Remember that popular, or even questionable materials, might still be very important to consider in a complete research project, depending on their usefulness in addressing your thesis or research question. Remember too that sources that disagree with your thesis may well be important to consider and include in your bibliography.
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Structure of annotated bibliographies
When preparing a bibliography of more than a page in length, you might want to consider ways of arranging the material that would help the user navigate through your bibliography and understand the nature of the materials cited. One way of doing this is through the use of subdivisions. For example, in a lengthy bibliography, you may want to divide the material in your bibliography in some of the following ways:
- by subtopic
- by date of publication
- by time period covered (century, era, decade, event, year)
- by type of publication (books, articles, reviews, Web pages, etc.)
If you decide to divide up your bibliography, include a heading for each category or subdivision. You might also consider writing introductory paragraphs for the different sections of your bibliography. Sometimes your headings will be fairly self-explanatory, but in other cases you may want to provide a description and overview of the material listed in the different parts in order to give your reader a more thorough sense of the choices you made in constructing your bibliography.
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Writing style and content of annotations
Citation: You may want or need to use an official style of documentation, like the MLA, APA, or Chicago formats. Be sure to check with your professor. The library guide on Academic Citation and Writing might be useful to consult. If you are not required to use an official style of documentation, you should at least be internally consistent in the way you cite your sources, in other words, cite all the books in your bibliography in the same way, cite all the journal articles in the same way, and so forth.
Mechanics: An annotation is not written in the usual academic style. This is one time incomplete sentences are acceptable in a scholarly production. You can choose to use either complete sentences, phrases, or some combination of both. Some of the best annotated bibliographies skillfully combine detailed information in sentences with brief notes in phrases or sentence fragments. Again, check with your professor to determine the requirements for your assignment.
Content: The content of annotations should incorporate the information you gathered while examining the sources, as described above. In addition, annotations often include biographical information about the author of each item and a description of each item conveying the number of pages, size in inches, or any other interesting physical characteristics (noting the presence of illustrations, maps, charts, and so forth).
The examples provided here have been selected to give you a sense of the variety possible in the structure and writing of annotated bibliographies. To find additional examples, you might want to search LUCIA for a subject of interest to you, and look for the subheading bibliography, for example, english literature--bibliography.
Bird Kills at Towers and Other Human-Made Structures: An Annotated Partial Bibliography (1960-1998).
Provides a brief but helpful introduction that spells out the scope of the project and cites other related bibliographies. It incorporates a wide variety of materials, and lists them all alphabetically by author. Of the examples listed here, it uses the most strictly academic citation style for the materials it lists. Stylistically, it includes a mix of sentences and phrases.
A Guide to World War II Materials
This is a good example of a selective bibliography that includes links to resources on a topic that can be found on one specific website, in this case, links on World War II found at the Library of Congress web site. In terms of style, the annotations are fairly brief and consist of both sentences and phrases.
Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights -- A Selected Bibliography
In this bibliography, the materials selected are grouped by type of material--encyclopedias, pictorial works, works for young readers--as well by different subjects and time periods. The writing style is a mix of sentences and phrases.
Pony Express
Although described as an annotated bibliography, this may not appear at first glance to be one. The text is written in paragraphs rather than in entries, and is what some might call a literature review or a bibliographic essay. It is particularly interesting for the history it provides not only of the Pony Express, but also of the history of the study of the Pony Express.
Teaching Family History: An Annotated Bibliography
This annotated bibliography makes good use of headings and sections in arranging the material presented into topical categories. It also includes helpful introductions to the various sections. Many of the annotations are written to provide a good sense of how the items described fit into the literature of the field. The writing style is a mix of sentences and phrases.
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Other guides to writing annotated bibliographies
Claremont Graduate University Writing Center: Writing Annotated Bibliographies
California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo: Writing an Annotated Bibliography
Cornell University: How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography
Earlham College Libraries: Writing Annotations
Purdue University's Online Writing Lab: Annotated Bibliographies
University of California--Santa Cruz Library: How to Write an Annotated Bibliography
University of Toledo Library: Writing Annotations
UW-Madison's Writing Center: Annotated Bibliographies. The parts of this guide on content and style are particularly useful.
And as always, if you need help, ask a Reference Librarian.