Annotated Bibliography Guidelines

Due Friday, November 11, by 11:55 p.m.

For your annotated bibliography, you’re responsible for finding, citing, and annotating sources relevant to your group’s research questions. (See this template.) Your bibliography should contain a total of journal articles equal to the number of your group’s members times three. (So if your group has five members, you need 15 sources; if six, 18, and so on.) A book counts for three journal articles, but remember: we want you to actually read these sources, and we’ll be checking your annotated bibliography accordingly.

The sources contained in your group’s project brief are “citeable,” meaning they count for your annotated bibliography, as long as you read and annotate them.

What counts as a source for this project?

Depending on the kind of project you’re doing, you might operate with different standards for what constitutes an “acceptable source.” For thisproject, I want to challenge you to adhere to this definition of an acceptable secondary source:

The sources contained in your annotated bibliography must be published in peer-reviewed journals or books from a major or university press.

This doesn’t mean that other sources, like newspaper articles and websites aren’t useful; just that I want you to dig into the scholarly literature for this particular project.

If you’re not sure whether a journal is peer-reviewed, you can ask. But in general, anything indexed in Academic Search Complete will qualify. If you’re having trouble figuring out how to find these sources, good news! There’s plenty of help available. Please see your group’s project brief for information on how to contact a librarian. Just remember that a librarian’s job isn’t to do the research for you; it’s to show you how to do it yourself.