If you’ve ever had write a long research paper, you know how tricky it can be to keep track of your sources. Writing anything, long or short, research or otherwise, that involves the use of outside sources presents challenges–not only the challenge of keeping track of sources, but also the challenge of using sources effectively. Creating an annotated bibliography can help you on all fronts.

What Is an Annotated Bibliography?

A bibliography, as you probably know, is a list of all the sources consulted during the writing of a paper, book, or other source-based text. Unlike a references list, a bibliography lists everything, including sources that were consulted but never referred to in the final version of the text (a references list, on the other hand, includes only the sources cited).

An annotated bibliography is just what the name suggests: a bibliography with notes. It includes not only information about the source that you could use as a citation but also a description of the source and your evaluation of it.

Why bother creating an annotated bibliography? As I said above, annotated bibliographies help your papers write themselves. It’s easy, when you’re consulting a source, to forget what is useful (or not useful) about it. It’s easy to move on to the next source without noting specifically what it is about the current source that called your attention. And it’s easy to get your sources confused–which one had that one amazing quote in it? Which one was about that one important thing?

When you write up an annotated bibliography properly, you set yourself up to keep track of that information, and you also include a lot of the details that you will need in order to write your paragraphs. Sometimes, you can lift entire sentences from your annotated bibliography and include them in your draft.

How to Compose an Annotated Bibliography

Annotated bibliographies have three parts:

  • Citation: Including all the necessary information according to whichever citation style you’re using (generally APA or MLA).
  • Summary/Description: A detailed description of the work, including what you found in it that is important for your specific purpose.
  • Evaluation: Answers the questions: How could you use this source for your project? Why is it source relevant? Contains your analysis of the work and possibly further questions you may have.

Example

Here’s an example of a two entries for sources you might use if you were writing a research paper about racial profiling. The first entry, for “Not Givin’ In,” is fully written out. The second entry is abbreviated; it’s there just to show you how you would continue adding entries to an annotated bibliography. For a long paper, your annotated bibliography might be twenty pages long. This sounds like a lot of work to do before you begin actually writing, but it pays off because it saves you a ton of time when you do start writing. (Note that the citations here are formatted according to APA style.)

1) Citation: Asante, M K. (2013). Not givin’ in. Twelve Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in
America Today. Eds. Gregory S. Park and Matthew Hughey. New York: The New Press.

Summary/Description
A personal essay describing a run-in with a cop that turned violent because of the cop’s irrationality and prejudice, this source provides a detailed description of the experience that has come to be known as “driving while black.” Asante describes how his encounter with the cop unfolds, depicting his struggle to remain calm and providing historical facts to justify his fear and anger. Ultimately, he uses the experience as an illustration of how flawed the U.S. justice system is and argues for a need to change that system.

Evaluation
Asante’s essay is directly relevant to my topic because it highlights larger problems with racially-motivated police violence and gives close-up descriptions of one man’s experience. Using quotes from his essay will help me establish and explain the irrationality on the part of some individual cops, the fear that results in the potential victims, and some of the problems with the system as a whole. It will also help me begin to document the voices in the African-American community that are calling for justice and explore the damaging effects of racial profiling. The essay reminds me of what happened in the Philandro Castile case; I need to look further into that. I also need to understand better the history of paddy wagons and how they were used.

2) Citation: Baldwin, J. (1955). Notes of a native son. The Beacon Press: Boston.

Summary/Description
James Baldwin’s writes about race inequality in mid-20th century America…

Evaluation
Baldwin’s book will help me grasp the history behind today’s racial profiling by police because…