Annotated Bibliography

What is an Annotated Bibliography?

An annotated bibliography is a list of sources (books, articles, websites, etc.) with a short paragraph about each source. Think of this as part of a conversation with people interested in the same things you are; the annotated bibliography allows you to tell readers what to check out, what might be worth checking out in some situations, and what might not be worth spending the time on.

It’s kind of like providing a list of good movies for your classmates to watch and then going over the list with them, telling them why this movie is better than that one or why one student in your class might like a particular movie better than another student would. You want to give your audience enough information to understand basically what the movies (or scientific articles in this case) are about and to make an informed decision about where to spend their money (or time) based on their interests.

Purpose

As a researcher, you have become an expert on your topic: you have the ability to explain the content of your sources, assess their usefulness, and share this information with others who may be less familiar with them. If you plan on going to graduate school or doing some kind of research as a career, you will oftentimes be tasked with collecting sources for your lab PIs who will expect some form of annotated bibliography. While there are a number of different types of annotated bibliographies, this assignment calls for annotations that summarize and critically evaluate sources. Such annotations…

  • Sum up the content of the source, as a book report might.
  • Give an overview of the arguments and proofs/evidence addressed in the work and note the resulting conclusion.
  • When appropriate, they describe the author’s methodology or approach to material. For instance, you might mention if the source is an ethnography or if the author employs a particular kind of theory
  • Show how the work may or may not be useful for a particular field of study or audience
  • Explain how researching this material assisted your own project.

For this assignment, you’ll need to write annotations for 5 sources that you plan on including in your literature review. These annotations are explained in more detail below, but generally speaking they should include similar information as the Journal Article Analysis worksheet’s last two steps (Steps 6 and 7).

Audience

Similarly to the last assignment (the worksheet), this annotated bibliography is written to help you write the literature review. The annotations you use should make life easier by summarizing an article in a way that you understand and stating why you think the article could be useful to your project. This assignment is written for you to read later. Don’t make life harder on you future self than it needs to be!

Content, Organization, and Document Design Requirements

In order to receive a passing grade on this assignment, each annotation should

  • Be organized alphabetically like a bibliography or works cited page.
  • Include a full bibliography citation. This citation goes above the actual text of the annotation (something like a title or section heading), and it should adhere to the citation style you identified in Journal 2. If your journal uses APA Style, then your full citation should also be written in APA style. You can find some examples here (the “APA Example of Combination Annotated Bibliography” is closest to what I’m looking for, but you need to write in complete sentences).
  • Provide a clear summary of each source: Explain what it is about so that I can get a sense of the article.  Here you will want to clearly state the main argument or point and explain some of the topics and supporting reasons focused on in the text.
  • Offer a brief commentary on why the source is useful and what kind of evidence it adds to your project. Does it add a particular perspective or type of evidence? Explain why you are including it.
  • Be around about 100-150 words.The citation itself does not count towards this word count.

Style Conventions

This assignment is meant to help you manage your notes for the literature review. However, you should still use formal language and full sentences to convey information. Using shorthand can be helpful in lab notebooks, but it’s very hard for instructors, research assistants, PIs, and even yourself a month from now to understand what you said. Use clear and concise paragraphs for this assignment.

Example of Annotated Bibliography Entry

Here are two examples of a single entry from an Annotated Bibliography: one that is a bit easier to understand and another that’s targeted towards molecular biologists. You will have a list of 5 such annotations. As you can see in both cases, first comes the full citation information for the source. Directly below the citation is an annotation of the source—a brief summary plus how it’s useful.

Example 1

McNamee, Tom. “Ida B Wells – Big and Bad.”  Chicago Sun Times. Chicago Sun Times, 7 Dec. 1986. Web. 8 Jan. 2009.

McNamee explains the poor living conditions of the Ida B. Wells housing project and makes the implicit argument that several factors contribute to the problems experienced by the area. He describes the area and the buildings’ condition; articulates how the lay-out and design of the buildings affect the community; and explains how gang violence, vandalism, crime and a culture of poverty all contribute to the area’s problems. McNamee’s overall purpose seems to be to inform readers of the terrible living conditions experienced by residents and to identify the major factors contributing to the situation.  This source provides a general overview of the problems in the Ida B Wells as well as essential statistics about the project and the people living there.  It will be useful both for that kind of factual information as well as for McNamee’s explanations of where these problems have come from.

Example 2

Jinks-Robertson, S. Michelitch, M. Ramcharan S. Substrate length requirements for efficient mitotic recombination in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Mol Cell Biol. 1993 Jul;13(7):3937-50.

This paper seeks to determine the relationship between the length of DNA segments and the rate of homologous mitotic recombination by using Southern blot analysis and/or polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The authors discovered a linear response in segments from 960 bp down to 250 bp. However, the efficiency of recombination always fell substantially at 250 bp regardless of where the repeats were positioned in the yeast genome. This phenomenon of suppressed short sequence recombination is what my current project seeks to explain. My running hypothesis is that upon formation of a double-strand break, exonucleolytic activity destabilizes DNA ends so that they cannot take part in SSR.