Research Paper: Annotated Bibliography Intro

welcome students in this video I’m going to discuss annotated bibliographies first let’s talk about what an annotated bibliography is the word annotated is the past tense version of the word annotate which means to summarize so an annotated bibliography is a summarized bibliography and a bibliography is a list of sources so an annotated bibliography is really just a list of sources for which you’ve summarized each source the purpose of an annotated bibliography is again to collect and summarize sources and also to compare sources to spot trends among sources and different types of research and to form a conversation amongst sources in an earlier video on research papers I talked a little bit about how the research paper is sort of a conversation between different sources you’re going to present different ideas on different sides of your argument and you’re going to sort of have this typed out conversation between sources you know according to so-and-so this but according to this person this other thing and so the bibliography is going to help you sort of form that conversation and what we’re looking for in an annotated bibliography is analytical summaries so they’re not just summaries where you say what’s in the source you apply some analysis to it so you discuss what’s important about it or how you might use that source there’s two parts to each entry a bibliography line and a summary and in the Bialik bibliography line you’re going to use APA style I am NOT going to go over APA style in this video I suggest using a service like Zotero Zotero here’s a screenshot is a free piece of software that you can download that will help you organize your sources so you can see this is a screen shot of my Zotero that I put together for my thesis my master’s thesis and so I have a folder right here for thesis and I have all the sources listed there are I think 100 sources here and for each source if I click on it I see more information about that source and when I add a source I click this green button I click Add and then ask me what kind of source it is and you can see there’s icons for the different sources so these are journal articles this is a book these are newspaper articles not quite sure I think that’s a website with the little people on it and so I add I say what kind of source this is whether it’s a journal entry or a book what-have-you and then I type in over here as much as I know about that entry and once I’ve done that with my sources I can export the bibliography so Zotero will actually put together the entries for me and I don’t have to spend time formatting my entries in APA style so I would suggest using your service like that I have another video that I’ve added to the course blackboard on how to use Zotero after the bibliography line you have a summary and the summary itself has three parts first discuss the author’s credentials why should we believe what this author is writing why should we care what this author has to contribute second summarize the content and again this is an analytical summary so you want to discuss key findings you want to analyze what you’ve read discuss key terms really what you’re doing in this entry is you’re trying to provide enough information that when you move to writing your paper your information is sort of all in your bibliography so you don’t have to go dig through all of your sources again so it’s really important that when you can you include measurable data such as numbers important passages or quotes in your summary and names of theories that are discussed now one thing that I do see sometimes is that the summary will just be a bunch of quotes from the research paper and unfortunately that’s not going to cut it for an annotated bibliography you need to use your analytical mind to summarize what you’ve read in terms of what’s important what the data means and how you can sort of get value out of this research if you simply copy and paste lots of quotes you’re not going to earn credit because that’s not an analysis it’s really not even a summary it’s just selections and finally in the summary you want to explain the value of the source so how are you going to use it and this is where you can start to compare and contrast with other sources so if you have a source you’ve looked at previously that conflicts with or disagrees with the one you’re looking at now the third part of the summary is where you mention that and you can think about each of these sections as its own giant paragraph authors credentials is probably gonna be the smallest paragraph and then a giant paragraph in which you summarize the content and then a third paragraph in which you explain how this is useful how it compares and contrasts to other sources there might be other sources that talk about similar terms or are similar findings so you want to bring those up in that third portion as well if you’ve done an annotated bibliography correctly then you’ll sort of write your paper using the conversation that arises in your annotated bibliography and I think I talked about this a little bit in the discussion of your research you have this conversation going on if you put that in your annotated bibliography when you go to write your paper you already have this conversation that’s happening in your bibliography of how the sources work together and what it all means you can you can pull that from your annotated bibliography instead of again having to go back to each individual source know what an annotated bibliography is not I think is important it can help you think about something if you think about what it’s not an annotated bibliography is not every source that you read some of the sources you run into aren’t going to be helpful especially early on in your research and this is just how research goes as you’re looking at your research question and you’re trying to understand the thesis statement you’re gonna make you’re gonna run across some research that might seem like it’s what you want but as you get further and further into your research you’ll realize some of it just isn’t what you want so if it’s just not the right topic or it’s sort of tangentially related or it’s very old research or something like that so I don’t want an annotated bibliography you from you that’s literally every source you read every piece of the bibliography it has to contribute to that conversation it has to contribute to your knowledge on a thake if you have a research question about sports marketing and you have a bibliography entry about twitter and its effects on teenagers you know that doesn’t fit maybe you read it when you were doing research because you thought it might help you and then you realize later it didn’t if that’s the case it doesn’t need to be an annotated bibliography an annotated bibliography is not single entries with nothing in common it’s really important that you look for how these resources work together what do they have in common with each other and what does it all add up to it’s not a list of things you didn’t read if you didn’t read the research don’t put it in your annotated bibliography if you rented a book from the library and you only read one chapter then your entry needs to discuss only that chapter and the APA citation needs to include the name of the chapter that you read so don’t misrepresent the work that you did if you only read a portion of something only discuss that portion and make it clear that you only read that portion an annotated bibliography is not descriptive summaries so you’re not just summarizing oh this is a paper by so-and-so from this University it’s about Twitter it’s about social marketing you really need to make an analysis you need to look for terms you need to look for key concepts the names of theories numbers and percentages of you know sir people who answered this or that on a survey you want to be really specific with the information that you include now I do occasionally get questions about sort of how do you organize your research and I’ve mentioned Zotero but I for some reason have a huge problem dealing with PDFs and digital communications I some for some reason I just can’t manage them and I’ve had students come to me before and they’ve had the same issue so I want to show you really quickly if you’re struggling with managing your sources on your computer what I suggest is printing them out and I’m gonna show you this is all the research for a paper that I wrote recently and I printed out everything now this is not I didn’t include books I had other I had maybe ten books but I had to give them back to the library so they’re not in my pile but I printed out all of the research that I found online and you can see it that I color-coded it so as I went through I put a post-it note on each piece that was a different color based on what it was generally about so I was looking at some themes in my research now my research was on how museums are using mobile apps and so I did a ton of research on how museums are using mobile apps and I started to see some themes for example mmm multimedia the I saw lots and lots of research about multimedia being used in apps in museums so any piece of research that I printed that was about multimedia I gave it a blue post-it note with mmm yellow social any social media that was being used in apps and museums printed it gave it a yellow post-it note that says social on it you can see I’ve highlighted key passages so I can put those in my annotated bibliography or if I have too many for the annotated bibliography at least I don’t have to read this again when I need those quotes for my paper and then I you know here’s another multimedia with blue and then another theme that I found was wayfinding apps that help people get around and those were really the three major types of apps that I saw in the research wayfinding multimedia and social apps so I printed everything out and I categorized it and it really helped me think about how to approach all of these different pieces of research you do not have to do this I’m not gonna ask you to turn in your category is anything like that but if you are a person like me who just struggles to deal with digital relics like PDFs and screenshots of research online this might be the avenue for you you need 20 pieces of research the library will accommodate that you have enough printed pages to do that or if you’re at home that’s probably still a manageable amount if you want to print them that’s just my advice if you get a little flustered with the organization of your research so I have a few tips before I let you go on conducting your annotated bibliography obviously I want to use the correct APA citation format and again I suggest that you just let a computer do it for you and get Sottero or some other service there are some services I know I think Firefox has a plug-in where you can just press the button and it will look up the citation for the page you’re on just get a computer to do it for you you don’t want to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out where the commas go and whether something’s italicized that’s probably a waste of your time you want to use correct document format so indents spaces where needed and I have an example of that coming up cite original sources so I talked about this in the last video don’t if you have a review of research or a news article about research find the original resource resource for that use an academic voice this is an academic paper so avoid me my I this is not your opinion this is your analysis build on prior work or review your prior work as you go and use previous sources to find additional sources so I’m gonna go through those one by one use the correct document format there’s an example available on blackboard it’s a PDF that you can download you’ll notice that the first line is not indented and the rest of the lines are indented so make sure you use that in your format cite original sources again find the original source instead of using the secondary source if you can so in the book net smart for example Howard Rheingold discusses some work on blogger voice by filigree and here’s the entry where he discusses that this is a Kindle book so you can actually click on the little 26 footnote and that will take you to the citations and you can see this entry it has the link so if you click the link there’s the original resource you don’t want to quote Howard Rheingold quoting fill a green that doesn’t make sense you want to quote the original writer again use academic voice so avoid I me and my here’s a rewrite to show you the difference if you have trouble doing this just write it the way you want first and then go back and get rid of I me and my so an old version I can use their definition a freemium model how to explain how streaming generates revenue um actually not a bad way to put it but keep in mind you want to be able to use some of what you have in the annotated bibliography in order to write the paper so if you just go ahead and start by writing it in an academic voice then it’s very much closer to the final research paper style of writing and less conversational you could actually copy and paste some of this and we then put it in your paper and rework it a little bit instead of having to completely rewrite it so instead of saying I could use their definition to explain how streaming generates revenue um explain what that is explain how streaming generates revenue according to these two researchers I could use argument they brought up about streaming and say you know they argue that streaming is often better times is often times better quality than prior to copies so you can take a look at this old and new example build on your prior work every time you turn your work in include your previous work the effect of this is that you’re gonna be turning in the same bibliography over and over again and just something as an example here’s a piece from a former student there’s the research question which they turned in and then their thesis statement with which they turned in and then they have annotated bibliography and they just keep adding to that so first they sent the research question then they added the thesis statement then they started adding the bibliography entries so just keep adding and adding to the same document use previous sources to find new sources if a paper really helps you I know it’s difficult sometimes to get on the right foot to really get to an a research agenda that becomes fruitful for you for you so as soon as you find a paper that really helps you look at the bibliography for it for similar sources so this is the bibliography of a source that I found helpful I’m gonna go through that and I’m gonna read the titles and see if any of these might be helpful to me as well because they’re obviously similar in nature to the source that helped me the source that helped me looked at these so I should look at them too so this is a neat little trick for finding sources when you’ve got source a few sources already that are helpful keep going down that path see what was helpful to those people and finally I just remind you about the organization an annotated bibliography is presented in alphabetical order by the last name of the author so as you add entries each week you’re not going to just add them to the bottom you’re gonna add them where they belong in the alphabetical order put spaces between entries so I can tell where an entry begins and where an entry ends and then use proper formatting again which includes indents on all lines except for the first so it should look like this over and over and over again that’s everything if you have any questions about annotated bibliographies or you want me to look at yours because you’ve got one started please feel free to send your questions or your draft my way and I will get back with you as soon as I can I look forward to seeing the start of your bibliographies