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Annotated bibliography entries have two parts. The top of the entry is the citation itself. It is the part that starts “Parsons, Matt’” and that lists information like the name of the writer, title of the publication, the date of publication, and other publishing information.

The second part of the entry is the summary of the evidence being cited. A good annotated bibliography summary provides enough information in a sentence or two to help you and others understand what the research is about in a neutral and non-opinionated way.  They are an example of this sort of very brief,

“just the facts” sort of summary. The most important goal of your brief summary is to help you, colleagues, and other potential readers get an idea about the subject of the particular piece of evidence.

Summaries can be challenging to write, especially when you are trying to write them about longer and more complicated sources of research. Keep these guidelines in mind as you write your own summaries:

· Keep your summary short. Good summaries for annotated bibliographies are not “complete” summaries; rather, they provide the highlights of the evidence in as brief and concise a manner as possible, no more than a few sentences.

· Don’t quote from what you are summarizing. Summaries will be more useful to you and your colleagues if you write them in your own words. Instead of quoting directly what you think is the point of the piece of evidence, try to paraphrase it.

· Don’t “cut and paste” from database abstracts. Many of the periodical indexes that are available as part of the library’s database include abstracts of articles. Do no “cut” this abstract material and then “paste” it into your own annotated bibliography. For one thing, this is plagiarism. Second, “cutting and pasting” from the abstract defeats one of the purposes of writing summaries and creating an annotated bibliography in the first place, which is to help you understand and explain your research, and identifying how each publication is to be used in your paper.

Different writers will inevitably write slightly different summaries of the same evidence. Some differences between different writers’ summaries of the same piece of evidence result from different interpretations of what it important in the research; there’s nothing wrong with that. However, two summaries from different writers should both provide a similar summary. In other words, it is not acceptable when the difference of interpretation is the result of a lack of understanding of the evidence.

Why Write Annotated Bibliographies?

An annotated bibliography is an excellent way to keep track of the research you gather for your paper. Make no mistake about it— it is extremely important that you keep track of all of your evidence for your research paper, and that you keep track of it from the beginning of the process of research writing.

There’s nothing more frustrating than finding an excellent article or book chapter you are excited about incorporating into your research project, only to realize you have forgotten where you found the article or book chapter in the first place. This is extremely frustrating, and it’s easily avoided by doing something

like writing an annotated bibliography.

You could use other methods for keeping track of your research. For example, you could use note cards and write down the source information as a proper citation, then write down the information about the source that is important. If the material you know you want to use from a certain source is short enough,

you might even write a direct quote, which is where you write down word for word what the source says exactly as it is written. At other times, you can write a paraphrase, which is where you write down what the source means using your own words.

While note cards and other methods have their advantages, annotated bibliographies are an extremely useful tool for keeping track of your research.

An annotated bibliography:

· Centralizes your research into one document that you can keep track of both as a print-out of a word-processed file and as a file you save electronically.

· It also gives you the space to start writing and thinking a bit about how some of your research might fit into your project.

Consider these two sample entries from an annotated bibliography from a research project on

pharmaceutical advertising:

Siegel, Marc. “Fighting the Drug (ad) Wars.” The Nation, 17 June 2002: 21.

Siegel, who is a doctor himself, writes about how drug advertising has undermined the communication between doctors and patients. He says that drug ads have driven up the costs of prescription drugs, particularly big-selling drugs like those for cholesterol.  This would support my hypothesis that the media is paid by the pharmaceutical companies.

Wechsler, Jill. “Minority Docs See DTC Ads as Way to Address ‘Race Gap.’” Pharmaceutical Executive, WilsonSelect Database. Eastern Michigan University Halle Library, May 2002: 32, 34.

This article is about a study that said that African-American doctors saw advertising of prescription drugs as a way of educating their patients. The ads are useful for my research because they talk about diseases that affect African-Americans.

Even from the limited amount of information available in these entries, it’s clear that a relationship between these articles exists. Both are similar articles about how the doctor/patient relationship is affected by drug advertising. But both are also different. The first article is from the newspaper The Nation, which is in many ways similar to an academic journal and which is also known for its liberal

views. The second article is from a trade journal (also similar to academic journals in many ways) that obviously is an advocate for the pharmaceutical industry.

In other words, in the process of compiling an annotated bibliography, you are doing more than keeping track of your research. You are starting to make some comparisons and beginning to see some relationships between your evidence, a process that will become increasingly important as you gather more research and work your way through the different exercises that lead to the research project.

How many sources do I need?

Inevitably, students in research-writing classes always ask how many sources they need in their research projects. In one sense, “how many sources do I need?” is a utilitarian question, one usually attached to a student’s exploration of what it will take to get a particular grade. Considered more abstractly, this question is also an effort to explore the scope of a research project. Like a certain page or word count requirement, the question “how many sources do I need?” is an effort to get a handle on the scope of the research project assignment.

But ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer to this question. Longer research projects tend to have evidence from more different sources than shorter projects, but there is no cut-and-dry formula where “X” number of pages will equal “Y” number of sources.

However, an annotated bibliography should contain significantly more entries than you intend or expect to include in your research project. For example, if you think you will need or if your instructor requires you to have research from about seven different sources, you should probably have about 15 different

entries on your annotated bibliography.

The reasons you need to find twice as many sources as you are likely to use is that you want to find and use the best research you can reasonably find, not the first pieces of research you can find. Usually, researchers have to look at a lot more information than they would ever include in a research writing project to begin making judgments about their research. And, by far the worst thing you can do in your research is to stop right after you have found the number of sources required by the instructor for your project.

Questions to ask while writing and researching

· Would you classify the material as a primary or a secondary source? Does the research seem to be difficult to categorize this way? (For more information on primary and secondary sources, see Chapter 1, “Thinking Critically About Research” and the section “Primary versus Secondary Research”).

· Is the research from a scholarly or a non-scholarly publication? Does the research seem difficult to categorize this way?

· Is the research from the Internet—a web page, a newsgroup, an email message, etc.? Remember: while Internet research is not necessarily “bad” research, you do need to be more careful in evaluating the credibility of Internet-based sources. (For more information on evaluating Internet research, see Chapter 1, “Thinking Critically About Research,” and the sections “The Internet: The Researcher’s Challenge” and “Evaluating the Quality and Credibility of Your Research.”

· Do you know who wrote the material you are including in your annotated bibliography? What qualifications does the writer have?

· Why do you think the writer wrote it? Do they have a self-interest or a political viewpoint that might make them overly biased?

· Besides the differences between scholarly, non-scholarly, and Internet sources, what else do you know about where your research was published? Is it an academic book? An article in a respected journal? An article in a news magazine or newspaper? However, avoid citing secondary sources with no bibliographies (which means no newspapaers, blogs, or weekly magazines). 

· When was it published? Given your research topic, how important do you think the date of publication is?  You will have more credibility the more current the publications are.

· Are you keeping your summaries brief and to the point, focusing on the point your research source is trying to make?

· If it’s part of the assignment, are you including a sentence or two about how you see this piece of research fitting into your overall research project?