Writers' Resources  

An annotated bibliography is a selected list of citations to resources such as articles or books.

Each citation is accompanied by a brief description and critical assessment of the resource.

Preparing a good annotated bibliography requires good searching.  Here are some tips.

• To find journal articles, look carefully at the list of databases that relate to your discipline, and try searching the ones that seem most relevant to your topic. 
• To locate books, search either the library catalog or WorldCat.
• When searching these databases, use Boolean operators such as AND and OR.
• Use a truncation symbol, usually an asterisk (*), to display results having variant forms of words.  For example,  parent* will return results which include parents, parenting and parental. 
• As your gather citations, use the database's management tools for creating and emailing them for use in your bibliography.

Your professor may offer specific instructions on how to format an annotated bibliography and what should be the special characteristics of the annotations. However, most annotated bibliographies have the following common format:

• An organized list of citations, using a consistent standard format (ALA, MLA, Turabian, etc.).
• An annotation following each citation. The annotation is usually no more than 150 words (or 4-6 sentences long) and does not have to be written in complete sentences. Depending on your assignment, annotations may include some or all of the following information:
  
  
  • A brief statement describing the main focus of the work
  • A brief statement about the author's credentials
  • An explanation of the intended audience
  • An explanation of why the work did or did not meet expectations
  • Special features of the work that are unique or helpful

To locate examples of published annotated bibliographies, type the phrase "annotated bibliography" into the search box for the online catalog or a specialized database. Several entries will appear. Review the full-text to read sample annotations such as these, found in the Academic Search Premier database:

MLA style:

LeFavour, Cree. "Jane Eyre Fever".  Book History, 7 (2004), 113-141.  Academic Search Premier. Web.  3 March 2010.
Discusses the promotion of Jane Eyre in the United States before the Civil War, and its part in forming American literary taste.

APA style:

Barker, J. A. (1992). Future Edge: Discovering the new paradigms of success. New York: William Morrow and Company.
This book is a very quick read with 240 pages that discuss change in terms that are easily generalized to business, medicine, education or other applications. The text illustrates and discusses paradigm shifts in terms of how leadership, management, and staff are affected by change. Concepts are readily adapted to a school perspective. The strength of the book is in presenting concepts related to change that are not limited to education.

How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography (Cornell)

Writing an Annotated Bibliography (Cal Polytech)

Writing an Annotated Bibliography (University of Minnesota Crookston)