Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography will have the same basic layout as a Reference page. There are three major differences, however. First, you can include in your bibliography works that you think would be useful to your reader that you might not have used in the writing of this particular paper or article. Second, you can break down the references into useful categories and arrange those categories in ways that you think would be helpful to your reader. Third, you can add commentary to the references, telling your reader the particular virtues (or, if necessary, the shortcomings) of that resource. Commentaries should be concise, economical summaries, written in sentence fragments; if related, fragments should be connected with semicolons. The commentary should begin on a new line, indented slightly from the preceding line.

Example:

National Institute of Mental Health. (1982). Television and behavior: Ten years of scientific progress (DHHS Publication No. A 82-1195). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Documents connections between children's lack of attention in school and hours of television watching; provides scientific evidence of changed viewing habits over ten years.