AWD 3315

Summer 2024

Annotated Bibliography Assignment

Research can be a challenging, sometimes perceived as boring, thing. However, I find

that students who discover a topic they are genuinely interested in, genuinely curious
about, end up liking the research assignment, because it is an excuse to read what you
want. It is a call to dig deeper into your field, into a question that calls to you, into a
professional conversation, etc.

Finding a Topic
We will use this Annotated Bibliography to explore a specific controversy or social
issues your field is working toward solutions in. In her book on transdisciplinary
research, Patricia Leavy notes that certain problems are best approached across
disciplines. These problems can span global, socioeconomic, and human categories – a
very incomplete list includes climate change, energy independence, ecosystem changes,
pandemics, healthcare, terrorism, poverty, crime, education, literacy, and social injustice.

What are people having an ongoing, current conversation about that you can use this AB
to help you learn more. For example, what are ongoing conversations in the field of
political science leading up to the fall presidential elections in the U.S.? OR How is the
field of mechanical engineering addressing climate change? OR How is data science
being used to get healthcare to more people who need it?

Writing Goals Addressed

This project moves students through the goals of the Writing Program, including the
work under each category: rhetorical practices, engagement with critical perspectives, use
of sources and evidence, and revision.

Introduction Section
Any of these options could lead to support for your third project, but whatever you
choose, you’ll include a one-page, double-spaced introduction to your AB, informing
the reader about your research process. It’s easiest if you write this part last!

In this introduction, share:

 Any surprises, challenges, or moments of enjoyment you encountered with the
research process
 Any main takeaways from the research and/or the research process
 Your reflection on the “variety of voices” and interdisciplinary source goals.
The Basics:
For this assignment you will compile an Annotated Bibliography including four required
sources. Each entry will include a citation, a summary, an evaluation of the source’s
credibility, and a personal reflection on its usefulness and your personal response to it!
You will need to have spent some time with your sources to do this effectively.

Quick review of that last paragraph, each entry for the AB will have:
1. Citation
2. Summary (one paragraph per source)
3. Evaluation (one paragraph per source)
4. Reflection (one paragraph per source)

The goal of the assignment is to assess what research is relevant to your topic area and to
evaluate the credibility of individual articles for your project. This is a significant part of
moving from the student role of accepting the information given, to the role of
researcher critiquing and evaluating that information.

All of your sources should be relevant and professional. You can, however, write an
evaluation here for a source you ultimately decide is not worth using.

To begin:
1. Identify the Citation system being used in the journal articles you have collected,
as this is the citation system you should be using in your Annotated Bibliography.
If you are having trouble with this, please use the library resource guides. You can
also always reach out to me or a resource librarian at Snell.

2. Review the description of the Annotated Bibliography structure and format at the
Purdue OWL writing lab page at the following URL:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/
annotated_bibliographies/index.html
Note especially that an annotated bibliography includes a proper citation but also
an evaluation of the source and a reflection on its usefulness to your work.

3. Take a look at the student sample Annotated Bibliographies posted to our Canvas
page for reference.

Summarizing your sources:

You will read more about this as we move through the project, but to summarize a
source, you are looking for the main ideas. You should read the article for an
understanding of its overall ideas and conclusions and then write this in paragraph form,
in your own words. You should not use first person and should not use any evaluative
language. This means, not using words like interesting, good, smart, challenging, helpful,
etc.

Evaluating your sources:

The OWL guidelines ask you to summarize, assess, and reflect on each source and its
usefulness to your project. Most students create three sections for each source: summary,
evaluation, reflection. Though you should include each of these elements, I would like
you to pay particular attention to the evaluation.

The key to this assignment is to focus on genuinely evaluating the sources you find. We
tend to simply accept that a source is valid if we find it through the library or through a
reliable search engine. But this is not active research. When you are thinking about
whether a source is relevant to your subject area you should understand the content of the
source, and be considering not only how you found it but where.

•What do you know about the Journal or other source in which it was published? Is
it peer reviewed? Is it commonly cited in the field (check impact factors or rankings,
other metrics, found in the journals)? If it is a Web based source, what can you tell about
those who maintain the site? How are articles reviewed and accepted? What are the
ethical standards of the publication? *Please note that you want to examine the
publisher/journal not the database/search engine.*

• What do you know about the authors? Are they working in the field? Are their
credentials current? Are they affiliated with particular institutions?

• When was the article published, and importantly when was the research being reported
actually gathered? Is it still relevant? I once worked with a text that had been published
in the last year, but was reporting 20-year-old data. It can happen.

• Is the source (author or publisher) associated with any particular point of view or
potential bias? All arguments have a bias of sorts, a particular point of view. But it’s
important to consider if a source may be overly biased due to association with a particular
political or other agenda, or may be biased due to research funding. Recognizing a bias
does not necessarily invalidate the source but it does empower you to consider that
as you work with the material.

Asking these kinds of questions can reveal sometimes surprising realities about the
exchange of information in your field.
Reflection on your sources:
Your reflection paragraph should be written last. This is the place where you should be
using first person and your reader will get to understand your own reaction to the source.
What stood out to you? What did you think about it? What did you learn? Were there any
parts that you particularly liked or didn’t like? What are you thinking about in terms of
how this connects to your other sources and your research questions?

A note on currency

You will need to establish your own knowledge of the current conversation on the topic
you are researching. To accomplish that, the majority of your sources must be very
recent. How recent can vary by field. In the sciences, or in data driven social sciences,
where a new study or trend may upend the results of previous work, it is often essential to
have very current resource material.

Many fields consider 3 to 5 years old to be out of date, unless you are using the source as
a foundation or for historical background.

To determine the patterns in your discipline, a good place to begin (and to find additional
research material for your project) is to identify an article that you think is excellent,
recent, and highly relevant to your topic and review their references or works cited page
to see what type of sources are most commonly used and the date range.

A note on variety

The most successful Annotated Bibliographies will work with different types of
sources, including a mix of scholarly articles, ‘popular’ articles
(newspaper/magazine), data or statistics you have found, primary research, and
organizations/websites that focus on the area you are discussing. Be creative with
your source material. Particularly if you are working in a visual and/or auditory
field, work on incorporating some sources that are not text-based (film, audio
recordings, photographs, etc.)

You should have a minimum of the following:

 Two scholarly/peer reviewed sources

 One non-scholarly or “popular”, text-based source (think newspaper or
magazine article either in print or online)
 The fourth source can be any “type” of source, scholarly or non-scholarly.
 To work toward interdisciplinarity, at least one of your four sources needs
to be from a discipline outside your own, or an interdisciplinary source,
with researchers from multiple fields!
  You are welcome to use one source in a language other than English.

Keep in mind a founding principle in the development of transdisciplinarity is the goal of

including “non-academic stakeholders” and to move away from separating disciplinary
knowledge. How can you remove barriers from your own thinking and research process
as part of the goals of this assignment?

Overall, you also want to consider the variety of voices you are representing in your
Annotated Bibliography overall. Are all your sources written by white men who work in
academia? How is this limiting the scope of your research? How can you expand your
exploration?

Visuals are optional, but encouraged. Many of you are working in fields that produce
multimodal work (combining music, text, visual art, movement, etc.) Feel free to
incorporate sources and formatting that reflect this! Make this project yours!

A note on length and difficult

Some of the articles you are looking at may use vocabulary or jargon that is beyond
where you are. That’s okay! Use your skills as a reader to determine the focus, purpose,
and conclusions of the text. You will find that the rigid formats of many scholarly
articles encourage this kind of reading. Don’t underestimate your ability to understand.
And if it’s entirely beyond you, don’t be afraid to let it go. Make sure to review the
Library Tutorial worksheet and short youtube video to help you get started.

Major Project Deadlines

See Canvas for complete schedule!

Tuesday, May 21st
Complete: Library Tutorial Worksheet and post to Discussion Board by 11:59 p.m.
Complete: Topic Idea and Project Plan Worksheet and post to Discussion Board by 11:59
p.m.

Wednesday, May 29th

Rough Draft of Annotated Bibliography due to Google Drive Folder by 11:59 p.m. EST

Friday, May 31st

Peer Review letters and marginal comments due to Google Drive Folder by 11:59 p.m.
EST
Tuesday, June 4th
Final Draft of Annotated Bibliography due to Canvas Assignments by 11:59 p.m. EST