The Annotated Bibliography
© 2009, W. Todd Kaneko

This course has a focus on academic writing, as you well know. In our editorial columns, we've talked about reader-writer relations and the consciousness that writers have as they move through a piece of writing. Our next step is to talk about research methods. Over the next few weeks, your sole purpose in this class is to conduct research. You'll use research to figure out what you will be writing about, and you will be using research to help you shape your thesis statement. One of the tools you will use is an annotated bibliography, which you will turn in to me later in the semester.

A bibliography is a list of sources used for a particular writing project. You might know it better as "References" or "Works Cited" depending on the style format used for the piece of writing. The bibliography typically contains only bibliographic information: author, title, publisher, date, pages, and other information important to aiding the reader in finding the source on his or her own. An annotated bibliography includes a summary and/or an evaluation of each of the sources. When creating an annotated bibliography, you'll want to include the following things, depending on the specific assignment:

The annotated bibliography is a good tool for a research project because when you have to write annotations for your sources, you are forced to read each source more carefully, reading more critically both in terms of gathering data and assembling your sources with purpose. At the professional level, annotated bibliographies help to create a picture of the work that has been done in that particular field and how you might fit your scholarship within that existing body of work. Working on an annotated bibliography can help you to explore the field, to see what the authorities in that field are arguing about, and to develop your own point of view.

The annotated bibliographies we write will include summary, assessment, and reflection. This doesn't necessarily mean that you need to write an entire essay about each source—brevity is fine, as long as you don't sacrifice good description and evaluation of each source.

Format

Generally, the bibliographic information in an annotated bibliography is written in MLA or APA format. It's up to you to figure out which format you will use. The annotations are written in paragraph form, in complete sentences, of course. The lengths of annotations can be anywhere between a couple of sentences to a couple of pages, depending on the detail of the annotation and the purpose of the document. For our project, you should be able to write your annotatins in a couple of paragraphs. Following are examples of Annotated Bibliographies in MLA and APA formats. Click here for the pdf I got from the Academic Index.

Example One in MLA Format


Thor Alvarez
Professor Kaneko
WRT 305 36
12 February 2009

Captain America Research: Annotated Bibliography

Dubose, Mike S. "Holding Out for a Hero: Reaganism, Comic Book Vigilantes, and Captain America." Journal of Popular Culture 40.6 (2007): 915-935. Academic Search Premier. Grand Valley State U Lib., Allendale, MI. 12 November 2008 <http://ebscohost.com/>.

This is the annotation of the above source. If I was really writing an annotation for this source, I would now be offering a brief summary of what this long article says about Captain America. Note that I've bolded the title, and were this a real printed entry, the bibliographic information would be formatted with a hanging indent, just as it is in a normal Works Cited page. In this example, I am following MLA guidelines for the bibliographic information listed above. In the second example below, I use APA format—the only difference between an MLA format and APA format annotated bibliography is the formatting of the bibliographic information. See the second example for a sample entry as I would write it for the Annotated Bibliography project.

After a brief summary, it would be appropriate to assess this source and offer some criticisms of it. Does it seem like a reliable and current source? Why? Is the research biased or objective? Are the facts well documented? Who is the author, and how is he qualified in this subject? Is this source scholarly, popular, some of both? Note that you can complete this assignment by simply answering the questions posed here.

The length of your annotation will depend on the assignment or on the purpose of your annotated bibliography. After summarizing and assessing, you can now reflect on this source. How does it fit into your research? Is this a helpful resource? Too scholarly? Not scholarly enough? Too general/specific? Since "stem cell research" is a very broad topic, has this source helped you to narrow your topic? Note that you don't necessarily have to write three paragraphs for each source. I might condense the first two sections into one, including summary with assessment if I can make it work without overloading the reader. My instinct is to begin a new paragraph with the start of the reflection so my reader can instantly tell the difference between the logistical portion and the reflective portion of my entry.

 

 

 

 

Example Two in APA Format


Thor Alvarez
Professor Kaneko
WRT 305 36
12 February 2009

Captain America Research: Annotated Bibliography

Dubose, Mike S (2007). Holding out for a hero: Reaganism, comic book vigilantes, and Captain America. Journal of Popular Culture 40(6), 915-935. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00478.x

This article examines a samplng of super-heroes as they appeared in the 1980s and analyzes how they function as emblems of heroism in American popular culture. To accomplish this, the article first investigates the "intersections between morality, politics and conceptions of justice" particular to that decade in order to define the nature of lawful and vigilante heroes (916). Secondly, it uses an analysis of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen to demonstrate two ways that the vigilante hero exists in relation to the current state of affairs. And thirdly, it looks at the portrayal of World War II hero Captain America in the Reagan-era, and how hero-status necessitated the definition of "oneself as an entity separate from the powers that be" and a transcendence of "traditional notions of law, order, and justice" (916). Essentially, it is found that superheroes in the eighties do not earn hero status through individual heroic actions as much as their feats are labeled as heroic in relation to systems of belief in order and justice, as opposed to a strict moral code.

At the time of publication, Mike S. Dubose was a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Toledo. His scholarship involves the "intersections of popular culture and dominant political identities in the 80s" (935). Appearing in a peer-reviewed academic journal, this scholarly article is well-researched with many examples cited, and the synthesis of ideas is well-thought out in terms of the relationship between comic book heroes and political ideologies of that decade. Dubose does a good job of covering the vigilante comic book hero by citing some of the more well-known examples, but the impossibility of covering every hero, in every permutation doesn't undermine his argument. He sticks to major trends in both comic books and politics, and the result is an argument that offers an examination and analysis of those trends.

This will be a helpful resource for my project. It's scholarly and credible, and full of good data for me to incorporate into my own argument. I will probably stick mostly to the parts where Dubose talks about Captain America in the eighties, but some of his other data about Daredevil and Batman might prove useful early on in my project to help me establish for the reader the relationship between popular culture icons and political ideology as it appears in cultural studies scholarship.