Annotated Bibliography Assignment - STM01


By the end of the Research Skills section of STM01, you will have gathered at least twelve sources relevant to your thesis topic.  You will produce a bibliography in the Turabian format with short annotations. 

In the course of your library work for STM01, you will learn to find and examine at least twelve different sources that pertain to your thesis proposal exercise.  You may use any source you find during the course of the term for this project AS LONG AS it is relevant to the topic.  The Annotated Bibliography will consist of a Turabian style list of these sources. Each entry in the list must be followed by a paragraph in which you summarize and evaluate the source in question and relate the source to the topic you selected.

Guidelines

To help you gain experience in finding and using a variety of sources, the twelve sources you find must fall into specific categories, as follows:

 at least three books,

 at least three periodical articles, and

 at least three Internet documents (reports, etc.)

 The remaining three sources may fall into any of the above categories, or they may be classified as "other" (i.e., film, video, newspaper, personal interview, etc).

 


What an Annotation Should Include:

An annotation is a brief description of a work such as an article, chapter of a book, book, Web site, or movie. An annotation attempts to give enough information to make a decision as to whether or not to read the complete work.

·         Complete bibliographic information.

·         Some or all of the following:

o        Information to explain the authority and/or qualifications of the author. For example: Dr. William Smith, a history professor at XYZ University, based his book on twenty years of research.

o        Scope and main purpose of the work.

o        Any biases that you detect.

o        Intended audience and level of reading difficulty.

o        The relationship, if any, to other works in the area of study.

o        Relevancy to your thesis statement (topic).

·         The annotation should be about 100 to 200 words.

Sample critical annotation:

In addition to "What an annotation should include," a critical annotation evaluates the usefulness of the work for a particular audience or situation. The words that are in bold indicate what has been added to a descriptive paragraph about a source to make it a critical annotation.

London, Herbert. "Five Myths of the Television Age." Television Quarterly 10 (1) Spring 1982: 81-89.

Herbert London, the Dean of Journalism at New York University and author of several books and articles, explains how television contradicts five commonly believed ideas. He uses specific examples of events seen on television, such as the assassination of John Kennedy, to illustrate his points. His examples have been selected to contradict such truisms as: "seeing is believing"; "a picture is worth a thousand words"; and "satisfaction is its own reward." London uses logical arguments to support his ideas, which are his personal opinion. He doesn't refer to any previous works on the topic; however, for a different point of view, one should refer to Joseph Patterson's, "Television is Truth" (The Journal of Television 45 (6) November/December 1995: 120-135). This article clearly illustrates London's points, but does not explore their implications, leaving the reader with many unanswered questions.