Annotated Bibliography Template And Samples printable pdf download

Annotated Bibliography

Note: This document should only be used as a reference and should not replace assignment guidelines.

A good annotated bibliography will demonstrate your knowledge of the academic conversation

surrounding a topic. Annotated bibliographies are usually prepared in advance of a research paper,

though some may stand on their own.

You will probably spend more time researching and reading than actually writing your annotated

bibliography, since the written portion is fairly brief.

There are no official MLA or APA formats for annotated bibliographies, though they generally have two

parts: the citation and the annotation. Some may include a third introductory portion, called a preface,

though this section is fairly uncommon at the undergraduate level.

Tompkins, Jane. “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History.” Critical Inquiry

13.1 (1986). 101-119. Print.

Tomkins explores her attempts to uncover the “truth” about historical encounters between

Native Americans and European colonists through a personal narrative. Documenting her

research process chronologically, Tomkins shows how her perspective changes as she

consults historical documents written by first the colonizers and then the colonized. Tomkins

ultimately concludes that since no overarching historical narrative exists, students of history

must seek out competing versions of history to approximate the truth. This article represents

an important contribution to the field of historiography and will figure prominently in my

paper’s methodology section.

Citation

Each entry will include a bibliographic citation in APA, MLA, or another standard format. Follow citation

guidelines to create a citation as you would for a References or Works Cited page.

Annotation

The annotation describes the type of source, summarizes its content, and may also evaluate its quality

or usefulness for a certain project, usually in three to four sentences.There are several different types of

annotations, the most common of which are:

Descriptive annotation: a pure summary of the source

Evaluative annotation: includes a summary as well as an evaluation of points like the rhetorical

context, the author’s credibility, the quality of the evidence, the source’s place in the academic

conversation, and the value of the source to the current project. The example above is an

evaluative annotation.

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Annotated Bibliography Template And Samples