How to Write an Annotated Bibliography

Choose your topic

For help on choosing research topics, see our LibGuide on Choosing a research topic.

Clarify

If your assignment is not very specific, seek clarification from your instructor:

    Roughly how many sources should you include?

    What types of sources (books, journal articles, websites)?

    Should you summarize, synthesize, or critique your sources by discussing a common theme or issue?

    Should you evaluate your sources?

Find models

Look for other annotated bibliographies in your discipline and read them to get a sense of how an annotated bibliography works in your field.

Narrow your topic

Have you ever searched for articles on a research topic and received thousands of hits? This is caused by a topic (or search terms) that are too broad. Look at our LibGuides on “Choosing a research topic” and "Choosing search terms” to improve your topic or search. The narrower your topic, the easier it will be to limit the number of sources you need to read in order to get a good survey of the material for your annotated bibliography.

And don’t forget to tap into your professor’s (or other professors’) knowledge in the field. Ask your professor questions such as: “If you had to read only one book/article on topic X, what would it be?” Questions such as this help you to find and determine quickly the most seminal pieces in the field.

Make sure your sources are current

Some disciplines require that you use information that is as current as possible. In the sciences, for instance, treatments for medical problems are constantly changing according to the latest studies. Information even two years old could be obsolete. However, if you are writing a review in the humanities, history, or social sciences, a survey of the history of the literature may be what is needed, because what is important is how perspectives have changed through the years or within a certain time period. Try sorting through some other current bibliographies or literature reviews in the field to get a sense of what your discipline expects. You can also use this method to consider what is currently of interest to scholars in this field and what is not.