The Annotated Bibliography

You've had experience putting together a "Works Cited" or "References" page for your research essays, but you may not have had experience writing an annotated bibliography, which includes descriptions and comments about each of your sources. It is a list where each citation is followed by a short descriptive and sometimes evaluative paragraph or annotation. Many scholars use published annotated bibliographies during their research to help them narrow down the material that seems most relevant to their work, but you might be asked to write one as part of a larger project for a class, sometimes in preparation for a literature review or a research proposal. Annotated bibliographies, then, can serve a lot of different purposes, so if you are assigned one, you want to be sure you understand your role as a researcher and a writer.