Columbia College
This guide is adapted from Annotated Bibliography: How to Create One by Loyola Marymount University's William H. Hannon Library.
An annotated bibliography is a helpful research tool that identifies and critiques useful resources for a specific subject. It includes a short commentary for each book, article, website, and so forth that it lists. The commentary can be descriptive, that is, it can simply describe the resource. Or the commentary can be evaluative, that is, it can tell about the resource's point of view, strengths and weaknesses, and what kind of research it would be useful for. For this course, it is both! Annotated bibliographies answer the question: "What would be the most relevant, most useful, or most up-to-date sources for this topic?" You can see how they are of value to others. And, as an assignment, they get you to engage in the work of scholarship, using your knowledge, research, and critical thinking skills.
There are two major types of annotated bibliographies:
A descriptive or informative annotated bibliography describes or summarizes a source like an abstract. It also describes why the source is useful for researching a particular topic or question and what the author's main arguments and conclusions are without evaluating what the author concludes.
For example:
Breeding evil. (2005, August 6). Economist, 376(8438), 9. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com
This editorial from the Economist describes the controversy surrounding video games and the effect they have on people who use them. The author points out that skepticism of new media have gone back to the time of the ancient Greeks, so this controversy surrounding video games is nothing new. The article also points out that most critics of gaming are people over 40 and it is an issue of generations not understanding one another, rather than of the games themselves. As the youth of today grow older, the controversy will die out, according to the author. The author of this article stresses the age factor over violence as the real reason for opposition to video games and stresses the good gaming has done in most areas of human life. This article is distinctive in exploring the controversy surrounding video games from a generational standpoint and is written for a general audience.
* Please pay attention to the last sentence. While it points out distinctive features about the source, it does not analyze the author's conclusions.
An analytical or critical annotated bibliography not only summarizes the source and points out its distinctive features, it also analyzes what is being said. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of what is presented as well as describing the applicability of the author's conclusions to the research being conducted.
* This is the type of annotated bibliography you are putting together for this course.
For example:
Breeding evil. (2005, August 6). Economist, 376(8438), 9. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com
This editorial from the Economist describes the controversy surrounding video games and the effect they have on people who use them. The article points out that most critics of gaming are people over 40 and it is an issues of age not of the games themselves. While the author briefly mentions studies done around the issue of violence and gaming, he does not go into enough depth for the reader to truly know the range of studies that have actually been done in this area, other than to take his word that the research is unsatisfactory. The author of this article stresses the age factor over violence as the real reason for opposition to video games and stresses the good gaming has done in most areas of human life. This article is a good resource for those wanting to begin to explore the controversy surrounding video games; however, for any doing serious research, one should actually examine some of the research studies that have been done in this area rather than simply take the author's word that opposition to video games is simply due to an issue of generational divide.
* Please pay attention to the last sentence. It criticizes the author's lack of evidence presentation.