Continuing on from earlier work (here, here, and here), I mean to narrate my process for putting together an annotated bibliography of the sort students are asked to compose in their third week of the session. As in earlier posts, I’ll not be using the template the University provides its students, although what I do produce will again be remarkably similar, as the University’s template works in APA format. I still continue to hope that my remarks and the resulting document will be helpful for my future students and others’.

For the assignment, students are asked to develop an introduction and five three-part annotations; the annotations are expected to consist of an APA-style citation, a summary of the cited source, and an assessment of that source’s usefulness to the project. Annotations should be alphabetized by citation, and the sources they treat should be secondary (that is, talking about a thing rather than being the thing itself) sources of a scholarly nature. The introduction does well to note the thrust of the overall project and the methodology and rationale for source selection.

As in previous exercises, I began by formatting my document, setting my typeface to double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman and inserting running heads as appropriate. I also stubbed out spaces for my introduction and annotations, since the formatting should shift within the latter; citations take a hanging indentation, while paragraphs such as the introduction, summaries, and assessments take a first-line indentation (half an inch in all cases). I also inserted a blank line between annotation-stubs to make future reading easier. Titles and running heads were inserted as usual and appropriate, as well.

Because I had already done some work establishing a thrust for the project and laying out search methods, I worked first on my introduction. Since the project is a continuation of work already done, I brought over what I could from previous materials, incorporating the earlier work without comment. (This can only be done ethically if the carry-over is within the development of a single project, as in ENGL 135. Carrying work from term to term or class to class–say, from ENGL 112 to ENGL 135–requires citation.) Although I had cited and summarized two sources, however, I felt I should not bring them over; the idea is to find more information, rather than to re-hash information already obtained.

As such, I re-ran my initial search to bring up the results I already knew I had, and I looked again at those I had not already incorporated into the project. One such source focused on instrument maintenance, rendering it useful for other purposes than mine; another served only as the front-matter of a journal, making no argument. The third, though, looked at the decades-long endurance of one organization, suggesting that it might speak in some way to support; I read it, finding a small amount of useful material in it. As such, I drafted its citation, summary, and assessment, incorporating each into my bibliography. (Note that the citation omits database information, following current APA guidelines reported on the Purdue OWL.)

Annotating the source, however, exhausted the resources from the initial search, so an expansion of search parameters seemed in order. The first such was to open the search to articles dating back to 2008–ten years prior to work on the project and after several of the significant cultural events that continue to influence the project-present. Three more articles emerged, of which all three promised some use; all three were reviewed, and those that were found useful were included in the bibliography. As they were, notes were added to the introduction to account for the expanded search method and rationale. Further notes were added to account for an article revealed in the references of another, as well as an outside piece resulting from an additional search.

As notes and annotations were finalized, formatting was adjusted to ensure that citations were not abandoned by the rest of their annotations. A review of content for style was conducted after, as was proofreading. All that done, the document was rendered into an accessible format, presented here: G. Elliott Sample Annotated Bibliography September 2018.

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