Why Create An Annotated Bilbliography?

To learn about your topic: Writing an annotated bibliography is excellent preparation for a research project. Just collecting sources for a bibliography is useful, but when you have to write annotations for each source, you're forced to read each source more carefully. You begin to read more critically instead of just collecting information.

At the professional level, annotated bibliographies allow you to see what has been done in the literature and where your own research or scholarship can fit.

To help you formulate a thesis: Every good research paper is an argument. The purpose of research is to state and support a thesis. So a very important part of research is developing a thesis that is debatable, interesting, and current.

Writing an annotated bibliography can help you gain a good perspective on what is being said about your topic. By reading and responding to a variety of sources on a topic, you'll start to see what the issues are, what people are arguing about, and you'll then be able to develop your own point of view.

To help other researchers: Extensive and scholarly annotated bibliographies are sometimes published. They provide a comprehensive overview of everything important that has been and is being said about that topic. You may not ever get your annotated bibliography published, but as a researcher, you might want to look for one that has been published about your topic.

used with permission: Annotated Bibliographies. 6 July 2011. Purdue Online Writing Lab. 8 Aug 2012. 

When you write an annotated bibliography, you are adding a brief description and evaluation of the book/article/website to its basic citation.  Your goal is to provide enough information about the resource so that a person can decide whether or not it could be a valuable resource to them. Writing annotated bibliographies takes a little practice, but the most challenging part is to be succinct!

For each citation in your bibliography, write a short paragraph beneath it, and try to identify the following¹:

Content - What is the resource about? Is it relevant to your research?

Purpose - What is it for? Why was this written?

Methods used to collect data - Where did the information come from?

Usefulness - What does it do for your research?

Reliabilty - Is the information accurate?

Authority - Is it written by an expert? ( A scholar? A practitioner?)

Currency - Is it up-to-date- for the topic?

Scope/Limitations - What does it cover? What does the author state s/he will cover? What doesn't the resource provide that could be helpful?

Ease of use - Can a nonspecialist use this resource? What reading level is it?