Its relationships to other studies in the field.

Why the source is relevant in to field of study of the paper.

The source’s strengths and weaknesses in presenting the argument or position.

A brief summary or overview of the source content.

This format is very effective for combination annotations.Īn annotation may include the following information:

Paragraphs – Longer annotations break the information out into different paragraphs.

Sentences – Complete sentences with proper punctuation and grammar, but are short and concise.

Phrases – Short phrases providing the information in a quick, concise manner.

Combination annotations include one to two sentences summarizing or describing content, in addition to one or more sentences providing an critical evaluation.Īnnotations typically follow three specific formats depending on how long they are.

It talks about how the source may be useful to a particular field of study or the person’s research project.Ĭombination annotations “combine” aspects from indicative/informative and evaluative annotations and are the most common category of annotated bibliography. It looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the article’s argument, the reliability of the presented information as well as any biases of the author. However, they do not provide information about the sources usefulness to the paper or contains analytical or critical information about the source’s quality.Įvaluative Annotations (also known as critical or analytical)Įvaluative annotations go beyond just summarizing the source and listing out it’s key points, but also analyzes the content. When appropriate, they describe the author’s methodology or approach to the topic under discussion. In addition, an informative annotation identifies the hypothesis, results, and conclusions presented by the source. Informative annotations, like indicative annotations, provide a brief summary of the source. Indicative annotations provide a quick overview of the source, the kinds of questions/topics/issues or main points that are addressed by the source, but do not include information from the argument or position itself. It may also describe why the source would be useful for the paper’s topic or question. This can include a description of the contents and a statement of the main argument or position of the article as well as a summary of the main points. Descriptive/summarizing annotations provide a brief overview or summary of the source. There are two kinds of descriptive or summarizing annotations, informative or indicative, depending on what is most important for a reader to learn about a source. Annotations can be descriptive, a summary, or an evaluation or a combination of descriptive and evaluation. The final step is to choose a citation style for the bibliography.Īnnotations come in different types, the one to use depends on the instructor’s assignment. Next is choosing the type or category of annotation, then writing the annotation for each different source. It starts with finding and evaluating sources for your paper. The creation of an annotated bibliography is a three-step process. They describe a work, but also critique the source by examining the author’s point of view, the strengths and weakness of the research or article hypothesis or how well the author presented their research or findings.

Abstracts do not serve an evaluative purpose.Īnnotations found in bibliographies are evaluations of sources cited in a paper. The summaries are provided so that a researcher can determine whether or not the article may have information of interest to them. Their purpose is to inform a reader about the topic, methodology, results and conclusion of the research of the article's author(s). They can be used as a reference tool as a person works on their paperĪbstracts are the descriptive summaries of article contents found at the beginning of scholarly journal articles that are written by the article author(s) or editor.Annotated bibliographies are completed before a paper is written.

These summaries are known as annotations. This summary provides a description of the contents of the source and may also include evaluative comments, such as the relevance, accuracy and quality of the source. An annotated bibliography is a list of citations (references) to books, articles, and documents followed by a brief summary, analysis or evaluation, usually between 100-300 words, of the sources that are cited in the paper.

Annotate with description an article