Annotated bibliographies provide brief overviews or summaries of articles related to a specific topic. Often they are compiled in order to demonstrate what sources are available on a topic that a scholar is considering studying.
For this assignment, you will find, read, and create annotations for scholarly articles related to a problem or concern that you have identified on Purdue’s campus. After doing some research, you will better equipped to write your research proposal and timeline (due Monday, March 31st) that explains to me your research intentions. Later, you will synthesize these sources in an Explanatory Research Report (due Wednesday, April 16th). Then you will combine this archival research with field research to develop a presentation (in an audience-appropriate mode) to address the problem you identified (presentations due during Week 16). Therefore it is important to select a topic that interests you and that you believe is a genuine concern for the Purdue Community.
In the past, students have addressed campus topics such as:
• Recycling options
• Orientation programs for students who do not live in residence halls
• Signage in Grant Street parking garage
• The use of paper and Styrofoam cups in the residence halls
• The need for a new student organization
• Placing the original Heavilon Bells in the bell tower
Guidelines and Criteria for Evaluation:
Your final annotated bibliography must consist of the following:
1. Annotations for at least ten sources. At least five of these sources must be scholarly journals.
2. A list of entries introduced with the full citation in MLA documentation format so your readers may retrieve the source in its entirety.
3. A brief summary of the content of each source. What are the main points covered in this site, article, book, or interview, etc.?
4. An evaluative statement on the usefulness and/or quality of the given source for a particular audience or research project. (Why is this source/research important to my understanding or to the argument I’m trying to make for my audience?)
5. A statement that indicates how you determined the credibility of the source.
Due Dates
Your preliminary annotated bibliography is due on Monday, March 31st. It is to be handed in with your proposal and timeline.
Your final draft is due on Friday, April 4th. When you submit your final draft, you should attach a copy of your evaluated rough draft.
I encourage you to visit the Writing Lab (Heavilon 226) for help with any part of the writing process.
The Annotated Bibliography
An annotated bibliography is used widely by different disciplines as a means of simultaneously providing a compilation of sources on a given topic and detailed summary information about the content of those source materials. Consequently, an annotated bibliography can be much more useful than an ordinary bibliography, which lists sources but offers no summary of their content.
Annotated bibliographies can vary greatly in length. They may consist of a few pages with five or six entries, serving as a resource for a short research paper, or they may be book-length documents, offering comprehensive information on a broad topic. But despite the variance in length, all annotated bibliographies essentially do the same thing: itemize a group of sources, provide complete reference information on a single topic, and supply a brief abstract for each source entry. Sometimes an annotated bibliography relates the contents to other sources being considered for the research. It may even include significant short quotes from the original text to help establish the author’s main points, attitude, opinion, and/or style. Sometimes a formal annotated bibliography begins with an introduction that contextualizes the research question and offers brief background information about the topic being researched.
Most often, annotated bibliographies consist of three distinct features:
1. a list of entries introduced with the full citation in a given documentation format (such as MLA or APA) to enable retrieval of the source in its entirety,
2. a brief abstract of the content of that source, and
3. an evaluative statement on the usefulness and/or quality of the given source for a particular audience or research project.
Because of the inclusion of this third component, the annotated bibliography has an obvious bias. It is not intending to be totally neutral in the way many abstracts are; rather, it is offering a perspective on the content and value of a group of related resources.
Keep in mind that to write an annotated bibliography, as opposed to a simple bibliography, a writer must read (or at least carefully skim) the sources in order to compose effective abstracts. They are much more demanding to create than ordinary bibliographies, which simply list resources according to the format rules of some particular system of documentation. Not surprisingly, annotated bibliographies are also much more useful to a reader and/or potential researcher seeking information on a given topic.
--last section excerpted from Academic Writing: Genres, Samples, and Resources
Your Annotated Bibliography is worth 100 points.
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