Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibiliography evaluates the relative merits of a work. Include all of the works you reviewed for your paper, even if you do not use them in the final draft. For the Composition II annotated bibligraphy, focus your annotation on how you will use the source in your paper.

While an annotated bibliography may not include all of the following items for each source in the bibliography, some of the items normally reviewed in an annotated bibliography are:

• Type of source
  • reference
  • book-length treatment
  • chapter study
  • magazine
  • journal
  • Internet
• Type of information
  • biography
  • autobiography
  • treatise
  • summary
• Quality of information
  • Currency -- how up-to-date
  • Scholarship
    • Background of author
    • World view of author
    • Resources used
    • Quality of writing (accessibility)
  • Reputation of work
    • classic study
    • firsthand accounts
    • detailed analysis
  • Special features
    • index
    • bibliographic crossreferences
    • physical features of text that enhance presentation/understanding of materials
    • supplementary materials--photos, maps, charts, graphs

  For instance, suppose I was doing my paper on Richard P. Feynman the physicist, and I was using as one of my sources the book Six Easy Pieces by Feynman. My annotated bibliography entry might look like this:

  Feynman, Richard P.  Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained 
  
       by its Most Brilliant Teacher.  Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
  
            Despite the title, this is a fairly hefty discussion by Feynman of 
  
            some basic physics and its relationship to the other sciences.  I 
  
            found the introduction by Paul Davies and the brief biography
  
            at the end of the book the most useful for my paper.
  
  

  The citation listed should be the same as it will appear on the Works Cited page of your finished paper (Note: if you do your annotated bibliography on a word processor, you can save your file under a different file name and then just remove the annotations, change the title to read Works Cited and use it as the Works Cited page of your paper.