New College Writing Program Library Guide
Guide to selecting research topics, writing a research question, finding, evaluating, and citing scholarly articles
What is an annotated bibliography?
An annotated bibliography is an organized list of your sources that includes additional information about the sources. This information can be descriptive, explanatory, and/or evaluative in terms of quality, relevance to your own research project, as well as explorative in how the work provides options for further research.
To write a good annotated bibliography you need to be:
- Concise: Go to the point of what is the book/article about, in few words, summarize.
- Evaluative: Determine who is the author, what is his/her expertise in the topic, how reliable is the information
- Critical: Reflect on what is the strength and weakness of the work, what is missing, etc.
- Comparative: how each piece review compares to other similar works