Annotated Bibliography Assignment

Once you’ve begun to receive the articles relevant to your proposal, you’ll want to read them. After reading each article it’s important to note how the article impacts or relates to your research. This keeps re-reading to a minimum and saves valuable time in the long run.

Writing a short summary of the article (~ 100 words), briefly covering its main point(s) and including the relationship of the article to other topics (such as your research question) is called annotation. An annotated bibliography is a collection of these annotations.

The Assignment

After you’ve identified, located, or requested and received, your peer-reviewed journal articles, expand your bibliography by annotating some reference. The ability to use your annotation at some later point decreases once the annotation becomes too long; keep each annotation to approximately 100 words. For some articles you may list one or two critical ideas only (e. g., “do methods like this”, “great background literature”, “check data analysis section”). Do this for at least 5 of the citations in your bibliography. Please realize that this is a powerful, you may want to start annotating all of your articles throughout your career. Your choice.

The whole of the annotations must show that you have made significant progress in locating and understanding the relevant literature that is helping you narrow the focus of your interests into a question that can be addressed in a single semester.

Each annotated bibliography should include the following.

Your entire bibliographic list with a minimum of 5 annotated entries containing:

Complete Citation:

Literature type:

Intended Use:

Summary:

Please number your entries.

Provide a minimum of 5 entries for a C, 12-14 for a B and more than 15 for an A.
As with previous assignments, please make sure that you include your name and research question at the top of the assignment.

Here is a sample of an exemplary annotated bibliography by Justin Hojnacki (Fall 2008) that cites several items of gray, secondary, and primary literature.  He does a good job of summarizing the articles and explains how the reports, books and articles relate to the proposal to learn about the interactions between stormwater and surface water on the FGCU campus.

Comments

As we have discussed in class, your proposal does not have to be your Senior Project. Many students take the research that they do for their proposal and evolve it in different, but related, directions for their Senior Project. It may be of benefit to annotate the papers you read in greater detail than we require for this assignment.

© Meers, Savarese, Demers, Barreto, Kakareka, Volety, Everham, Cruz-Alvarez, Loh, Goebel, Fugate, Bovard, Hartley, Mujtaba, & Gunnels 2009.

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