Annotated Bibliography Guidelines

You will be spending much of your time writing annotated bibliographies, which are essentially reflections on and brief summaries of articles that you have read. Annotated bibliographies will be part of both the project you turn in, as well as the writing portfolio. The goal of these writings are to help you learn to critically evaluate the articles, to help improve your writing and summarization skills, as well as to serve as a good reference for you in your future professional career.

Your life as a professional will involve reading a number of different books, papers, articles, etc. As this list of readings grow, it is helpful to have more than just your memory to rely on, especially as you want to reference some of the things that you've read in the past or refer others to these works. In the future, your annotated bibliographies can help remind you of where some of those gems are that you want to keep track of, and warn you about those papers you've read that are worthless and not to be bothered. Keeping an annotated bibiliography of your readings will serve you over your entire professional life.

You may use the form that you want for the annotated bibliographies. However, they must include:

• full bibliographic citation information
• a brief description of the main argument or topic of the paper in your own words
• reactions, comments, concerns, or questions about the reading.

This is your chance to practice writing plain prose (i.e. sentences and paragraphs). Do not use bullets or numbered lists. There is no required length for these annotated bibliographies. Just be sure the summarization is understandable to someone who has not read the paper, and that you have several comments about the paper. The reactions/comments/questions should be at least half the content of the bibliography. As a guideline, annotations should generally be 300-600 words for each article.

The main criteria for evaluating these is the extent to which you have addressed the main issues of the paper and reflected on the content. Check the assignment guidelines page for more information on how to write annotated bibliographies for this class, some examples, as well as information on grading criteria.

As mentioned previously, the annotated bibliography consists of two main parts: a summarization of the assigned paper, as well as an analysis portion that gives comments, concerns, questions raised, and evaluations of the paper. Note that there is no exact format required; the summarization and analysis maybe interspersed. However, use plain prose, not bullets or numbered lists in your bibliography. The audience for your annotated bibliography should be the typical ISC graduate student who may not have read the paper. Thus, you should provide brief one sentence descriptions of any terms that you use that may not be understandable to the typical ISC grad student. You will have to use your own judgement as to what terms people will generally know about, and what terms need to be defined.

For the summarization portion of the annotated bibliography, aim to provide a description of the results and/or the purpose of the paper, as well as a brief overview of the ideas, implemented algorithms, case studies, and/or logical arguments on which the paper is based. Since this is a summary, not every single idea need be presented. As a guideline, aim to present several of the main ideas in the paper in just enough detail that they are understandable by someone who has not read the paper.

Explanation of the ideas in the paper is more important than defining actual terms. Take the term UDDI for example. UDDI is a protocol for describing and storing directory information for web services. Instead of saying "this paper studies several different ways to implement UDDI" and then defining UDDI, you could instead say "this paper studies several different methods for storing directory information for web services" and not mention UDDI at all.

For the analysis portion of the project, you are trying to judge the quality of the paper, as well as talk about the paper in a broader context than just the what the authors presented in the paper.

For the purposes of evaluating the paper, consider the following questions:

• To judge a paper, you should know the target audience. Who was this paper written for? What kind of paper is it? A review/survey paper? A technical research paper? An opinion paper?
• How much of the overall project is work actually done by the authors of the paper? What previously related work do they build upon?
• What was new and/or significant about the project or ideas in the paper? How does it relate to previous work done in the area?
• Was the paper interesting to you? Why or why not?
• How well did they solve their problem? Was their approach valid? Are there alternative approaches? Was their reasoning logical? Are their flaws in their approach or reasoning?
• What are applications of the research? How is it useful?
• What area of information science / systems does this research belong to? Are there people outside this general area that might be interested in knowing about this paper? If so, why?
• What are the future possible directions for extending the work in the paper? Are there any future projects that could be done that incorporate the work done?
• Are there any ethical questions raised by the content of this paper? How about societal, political, education, commercial, or other implications of the paper?
• For annotated bibliographies that are part of your course project, how this paper is related to your proposed research project?
• How was it evaluated? Is this scientifically convincing?
• How well is it written?
• Are there questions remaining after reading this article?

On some papers, it may also be appropriate the credentials of the author. For example, on opinion pieces, knowing whether the author is biased on the given topic is one way to evaluate the paper. You may also wish to evaluate the writing style, or the way the paper is structured, and the accessibility of the paper. This includes questions such as "How much technical background do you need to understand it?", "Could the paper be rewritten so that more of it is understandable by a lay person?", and "Who was the audience for this particular paper?"

For papers which you do not understand fully, comment on which concepts and/or ideas you did not understand, why you did not understand them (if you can pinpoint why), and what sort of background you think you would need in order to understand the paper fully.

The annotated bibliographies are partly for you to reference in the future. Thus, you may also wish to keep additional information with your annotations, such as the date when you read the bib entry, where this reference was first cited (i.e. how you heard about it in the first place), other works in your bibliography that it cites, as well as similarities to other works in your bibliography. You also may want to list some keywords associated with the entry for later searching and retrieval.

You do not have to answer all of the questions in order to get full credit on the analysis/reflection portion of the annotated bibliography. You only need to show a significant amount of thought and clarity of reasoning in the comments that you provide.

Annotated Bibliographies will be given two integer scores between 0 and 4. One score is for the analysis portion reflecting your comments, reactions, questions on the paper. The other score is for everything else, including the summary, having complete bibliographic information, grammar, and good writing style. The overall score will be the average of the two scores. I expect the average score to be a 3. Thus, do not expect to get a 4 unless you have perfect grammar, good writing style, excellent summaries, and a large amount of good, quality comments on the paper. For writing style guidelines, see this page.

Here is an example of an annotated bibliography receiving full credit. The paper is here.The annotated bibliography is here. It was written by Josh Tenenberg and then slightly edited by Ed Hong and Isabelle Bichindaritz.

An example of some entries from Josh Tenenberg's annotated bibliography is located here. Note that his bibliographies are fairly light on the summary of the papers but they do an extremely good job at the analysis/reaction/comments. Some of these bibliographies would not receive full credit on the summary portion.

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