Writing an annotated bibliography is excellent preparation for a research project. Collecting sources for a bibliography is helpful, but when you have to write annotations for each source, you’re forced to read each source more carefully. You begin to read more critically instead of just collecting information. At the professional level, annotated bibliographies allow you to see what has been done in the literature and where your own research or scholarship can fit. The purpose of the annotated bibliography is to help you develop your literature review for your Capstone project. My capstone project consists of exploring what ideologies developers have used to sell politicians and local communities on the benefits of opening casinos.
So, a very important part of research is developing a thesis that is debatable, interesting, and current. Writing an annotated bibliography can help you gain a good perspective on what is being said about your topic. By reading and responding to a variety of sources on a topic, you’ll start to see what the issues are and what people are arguing about, and you’ll then be able to develop a stronger research question.
Your annotated bibliography should include 10 – 12 sources and entries. Your sources should be academic, peer-reviewed, and reflect all four disciplines of IA (politics, culture, environment/ geography, economics). Do not overly rely on policy reports or encyclopedias- most of your sources should be from academic books and journals.
Each annotated bibliography entry should fulfill the following tasks.
- Summarize: Summarize the source. What are the main arguments? What is the point of this article? What topics are covered? If (and only if) it is relevant to your future research project, describe the theoretical framework or the methods of data collection and analysis.
- Analyze: After summarizing the source, you need to evaluate it. Why is it a useful source? How does it compare with other sources in your bibliography? Does it cite other texts in your bibliography? Has it changed how you think about your topic?
- Reflect: Once you’ve summarized and assessed the source, you must ask how it fits into your research. How does it help you shape your research questions or methodologies? How can you use this source in your research? You may include, at the end of your summarization, 1-2 quotes that you might use in your capstone. Do not forget to include their page numbers.
- See the attached examples.
Finally, organize your entries according to thematic issues or core concepts that arise from your research question and its variables. Your annotated bibliography (and literature review) themes may be:
- Conceptual
- Presenting differing perspectives on defining a vague or contested term/ idea such as “sovereignty,” “democracy,” or “populism.”
- Methodological
- Reflecting the changes and innovations in methods and tools used to understand a concept.
- Cross-disciplinary
- Highlighting different disciplines’ findings and approaches to understanding a concept.
- For instance, how do political scientists think about “brain drain” versus economists versus anthropologists/sociologists? What does the research say about “brain drain’s” environmental implications through urbanization and migratory patterns?
- Relational
- Presenting trends in research findings over time.
- For instance, how have researchers from the 19th C to the present day studied and understood the relationship between religious identity and consumption patterns?
- Who are the major theorists, and what are the significant findings and trends on this topic?