Annotated Bibliography

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• To locate scholarly resources, use the MLA Bibliography Database , accessible through the library home page: <http://www.uscupstate.edu/library>.
• Click here to access a few tutorials on effectively using the MLA Bibliography Database.

• If your project is interdisciplinary (drawing upon the fields of history, philosophy, or science, for example), you will want to search the authoritative bibliography databases in those fields  as well as the MLA Database.

• For assistance in finding scholarly resources, come meet with me.

Choosing items for your bibliography

• Avoid insubstantial sources: Book reviews and brief notes are ineligible for this assignment.

• Emphasize recent work: In choosing, your bias should be towards recent published work, which means resources published within the last 10 to 15 years, roughly speaking.

• Identify landmark work: However, if you find an earlier work that seems particularly important or influential, include that in your bibliography. You'll be able to identify important or influential work by how often it is cited by other works.

• Focus on articles: Stick with articles in journals for the most part, unless there's a book that seems especially compelling to you. (This piece of advice comes from the fact that at an undergraduate institution like our own, you'll be able to get journal articles more quickly and more easily than you will be able to get books.) Book-length works are, of course, a valuable resource for research, but they will require a different approach on your part. Talk with me for strategies that allow you to get what you need out of a book as efficiently as possible; remember that tables of contents, introductory chapters, indices, and book reviews are your friends.

Writing the annotations

• Think about audience: Your finished annotated bibliography should be useful to anyone interested in your topic, not necessarily interested in the thesis you think you will eventually develop about your topic.

• Summarize & Assess: Make sure that each of your annotations provides not only an adequate summary of what a particular work of criticism says but also a thoughtful assessment of the quality of that work. Be alert to a critic’s assumptions, biases, and methodology.

• Make connections, if possible: Your annotation for one work might make a (very brief) reference to another work in your bibliography to point out such things as disagreement, influence, or a contrast in approaches.

• Be concise: Get to the point quickly. Do not write an overly long annotation: stick to no more than 200 words. Identify the main thesis of the your source and focus only on the main points. Quote sparingly; rely mostly on paraphrase and summary.

Example Annotation

• Sample annotation

• Your annotated bibliography will be made up of several items like this one.

For more information

Harner, James.  On Compiling an Annotated Bibliography.  New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2000.

USC Upstate Library, Reference Section: Z1001 .H33 2000