Instructions for Creating Annotated Bibliography Entries.

1. You must work in teams of two to create the bibliographic entries. On each team, you should determine an interest common to the two of you and locate your second article together. Then, I suggest you read the articles independently and each write an initial draft of your annotation alone. When these are complete, get together and discuss what the most important points are that you think should be included in the annotation. Then you should work on combining your two annotations into a single document.

 2. The Articles. You have been assigned one of the articles we will be all reading for your first annotation. The second article you will chose with your partner. The article must be at least peripherally related to our overall research project, but even so, this will leave you with a large amount of latitude. Get together with your partner and talk about the aspects of this research that seem to interest you the most and then try to find an article that reflects one or more of those interests. You should also try to chose an article that was published in a mainstream social science journal, rather than something that was a chapter in a book (do not use an article from a newspaper or magazine). Journal articles will be harder to read, but more useful and rigorous. Examples of social science journals that would be acceptable: American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Science Research, Social Science Quarterly, Social Problems, Sociological Quarterly, Sociological Forum, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Social Psychology Quarterly, European Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Mobilization, Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change, and there are many others as well. (It will also be easier to actually find your article if you stick with these journals -- all of which our library carries). If you need further guidance with this, please talk to me. We will talk about how to search literature databases for these kinds of articles later in this session.

 3. Form of the Annotation. The entry should begin with the complete citation for your article. Use the ASA standard form which you can see in the back of any article in the American Sociological Review. Examples of this format are also given below. The annotation itself should be 250 to 450 words long. It should fit on one page, single spaced, in 12 point Times New Roman font with 1 inch margins on all sides.

 4. The Content of the Annotation. The annotation should do three things: Summarize the article, point out what is important about it, and provide criticisms or point out shortcomings. You will have to work at being succinct so you can get all this in the space allotted. When you criticize, try to be reasonable and adopt a neutral tone. Your are just stating facts, not calling the author an idiot. The tone is important--you should try to imagine that (a) you wrote the article, (b) I wrote the article, (c) you are going bump into the person who wrote the article five minutes after they finished reading your annotation, or (d) the person has a darn good reason for doing what they did, they just didn't report it because the editor told them to cut it. This doesn't mean you should shy away from criticizing, but you should avoid inflaming the author by being as factual as possible. Notice the brief criticism I point at myself in the example. I don't say I am an idiot for ignoring regional differences. I just say this appears to be a shortcoming of the article. (In reality, I know I had a good reason for leaving this regional effect out but it was to complex to go into in an already very long paper.)

 5. Take some credit. Write "Annotation Written by _________ and _________" at the bottom of your annotation.

 6. The Presentation. When you present your annotations to the team, you should tells us more about the article than is contained in your annotation. We want to know if the author is nuts or not, so you can be more cut-throat. We also want to know enough about this article to decide whether or not to read it ourselves, so you will probably have to give a bit more detail on the piece including some commentary about how well the article is written and if the piece is even understandable. For example, with my article, you might want to comment that the piece is highly quantitative and technical, and because of that wouldn't make very good summer beach reading! Keep your presentation to 5 minutes or less for each article. Present the one we did not read first and then we'll use your second presentation to launch into a discussion of the week's readings. (Make photocopies for everyone and bring them to the meeting. There are 17 of us).

 7. Website. Give me an electronic version of your annotation either on disk or via e-mail. I will add it to our web site.

 

 Example Citation Styles: