HOW TO PREPARE AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY



An Annotated Bibliography (CSS 506/587/591)

Due: Friday, September 28, 2007

What is an annotated bibliography?

An annotated bibliography is an organized presentation of sources (with full references cited), such as books, journals, newspapers, magazines, etc., followed by a description of each item. This brief (usually about 200-300 words) descriptive and critically evaluative paragraph is the annotation. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited.

What is the purpose of an annotated bibliography?

The annotated bibliography may serve a number of purposes, including but not limited to:

• Providing a broad review of the literature on a particular subject;

• Illustrating the quality of bibliographic research that is available;

• Providing examples of the types of sources available;

• Describing issues on a topic that should be of concern to the scientists;

• Exploring the subject for further research and aid in refining research questions;

• Identifying the primary theories involved in studying similar questions; and

• Identifying the common methods involved in studying the topic.

A key point to keep in mind is that the specific content of your annotations will vary depending on your purpose and the nature of the source being reviewed.

Abstracts vs. Annotations

Annotations are descriptive and critical; they expose the source author's point of view, clarity and appropriateness of expression, and authority. Annotations are NOT syntheses of knowledge.

Annotations typically have four basic purposes:

Indicative/ Informative: Defines the scope of the source, lists the significant topics included, and tells what the source is about -- summarizes arguments, evidence and conclusions. Like abstracts, they are purely descriptive summaries found at the beginning of scholarly journal articles or in periodical indexes.

Evaluative/Critical: Assesses the source's strengths and weaknesses, and why the source is interesting or helpful to you, or why it is not. In addressing this function, you describe what kind of information and how much of it is given and evaluate the source's usefulness.

Combination: Most annotated bibliographies are of this type, and this is the type likely to be most applicable to the assignment.

What does an annotated bibliography look like?

You write and arrange the bibliographic entries (citations) just as you would any other bibliography. This is usually arranged alphabetically by author’s last name, although you also could order them by subject heading, theory, time, etc. This ordering is easy to do in EndNote (the EndNote default is alphabetical). Remember to be brief: include only directly significant information, and write efficiently.

TASKS:

1. Select a topic you think – at this point in time – you will pursue for your degree research or project.

2. Using library resources, identify key articles, book chapters, etc., that are central sources for your understanding of the importance, nature, and conceptual structure of the topic. Use only research and management materials on the topic from the professional or substantive literature (not popular or Internet pages -- though you may access them through these).

3. Create your annotation – kinds of information you could provide includes:

a. The content (focus) of the source.

b. Insights on the authors, institutions, study areas/populations (situational context).

c. The basic research methods (or approach) used in the study.

d. The theories used or proposed (if any) in the source, and the role they played.

e. Any conclusions the author(s) may have made.

f. Your reaction to the source:

How does the work illuminate your topic and informs your thinking about it? What are the source's strengths and weaknesses, and why the source is interesting or helpful to you (or why not)? What is the significance of this work for you, how can you use it? We expect specific comments about the utility of the piece in justifying your research, informing your methods, or establishing theoretical underpinnings of your ideas. Not all sources will serve all these purposes.

4. We expect to see a total of at least 20 references, providing full citations in APA style for all of them.

At most, half can be sources assigned in CSS 506/587/or 591.

Your 20 must include at least the following:

a. Sources from at least eight (8) different peer-reviewed journals

b. Three (3) book chapters, books, or federal or state research station publications (Government Docs). NOTE: edited books are hard to annotate!

c. Annotations of several recent (~last 5-7 years) sources, as well as several critical classic works; please label these so we can identify them.

d. If you are taking CSS 591: Five (5) sources should be annotated that are theoretical; at least two (2) should be predominantly theoretical (as opposed to purely empirical/descriptive); please label these so they are easily identified. Only one source can be from 591 class readings. These annotations should focus on the theoretical aspects of the work—constructs, propositions, logic, and adequacy of explanation. These do not need to discuss methods or study details. However, they should critique the papers according to criteria for strong theory and discuss the role theory played in the paper.

e. If you are taking CSS 506: Five (5) sources should be annotated based on the methods, methodology, or research approach used; please label these so they are easily identified. These annotations should focus on the methodological aspects of the work—including clearly addressing the levels of paradigm, methodology, application of methods and procedures, and reporting of methods and results. These do not need to discuss theory or non-methods study details. But they should critique the papers according to the criteria for validity and reliability of approaches and discuss the implications of the methods to the study outcome. (For example, were the methods sound? Were they appropriate for the questions asked? Were they carried out adequately and correctly?) NOTE: for students who are only in CSS 506, your assignment will only be 5 annotations in total.

5. Introduce your bibliography by providing:

a. The purpose of the bibliography and what it includes.

b. The research topic and research questions you are addressing in your literature review.

c. The significance of the topic and body of research literature you are exploring.

Below is an example of what an APA format annotated bibliography may look like.

Examples specific to research methods and theory will be handed out in class.

NOTE: The following annotation is intended as an example and model for your efforts, so is longer (526 words) and provides more coverage than we would expect from your annotations.

Hornig, S. (1993). Reading risk: Public response to print media accounts of technological risk. Public Understanding of Science, 2, 95-109.

This article, which is somewhat dated, reports a study of people’s processing of news accounts of risky technologies in a social setting. It challenges the “conventional” wisdom that the public is irrational in judging risks and doesn’t understand levels of risk. The author was an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Texas A&M and a well-known scholar of public understanding of science. Hornig bases her study on early work by Slovic, although the theoretical underpinnings are not well developed with theory or empirical evidence. She argues that people process information in a social context and much risk perception comes from media filtered through social context. Although the mass media are not said to fully determine public opinion, following “agenda setting theory,” she posits that the media focus public attention on issues and particular “frames.” Despite many claims about agenda setting, however, little is known about “how people actually respond to media information” (p. 97).

To assess how non-technical publics interpret media accounts, Hornig used 20 focus groups (114 people) of journalism students. They were instructed to read one of 8 articles about a risky technology, discuss it, and make a group recommendation about whether it was safe. Transcripts were coded by a single individual, using a grounded theory approach to identify emergent themes, with a focus on “arguments” used by the groups: information issues; negative impacts; benefits and alternatives; implementation issues; regulatory issues; and ethical considerations. The focus groups most often concentrated on the quality of the information (research) about the technology, which contradicts findings of other studies and may be the result of the task given. A major conclusion is that they focused on more than magnitude of risks, but also types of impacts, whether the public would be informed and able to make informed decisions, and ethical issues.

The author concludes that “public concerns about technological risk do not depend heavily on numerical representation of the probability of harm” (p. 106), a claim supported in other research. However, the study didn’t report if numerical risks were actually given in the news stories, so people may have been just discussing what was presented to them. They also sometimes used their personal experience to support or discredit claims about risks. Overall, the author seems to have an agenda of showing that the public isn’t “irrational” and actually uses several criteria for judging the acceptability of risk.

This study helps establish factors people consider when reading news accounts and also reinforces the notion that personal experience and word of mouth will be influential. The methods aren’t terribly useful to me, because I will be using interviews. Hornig doesn’t actually test agenda setting at all and doesn’t use any theories of group processing. The study itself is largely atheoretical and primarily descriptive. The author asserts that the study population is valid, but I question whether the students, and the task they were given, can accurately reflect how people really process media information; this doesn’t seem to be the way most people I know evaluate the news. Hornig didn’t use the existing literature on public risk perception to inform the coding, and no inter-rater reliability of the coding was assessed.

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