How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography
WHAT IS AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY?
An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph, the annotation. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited.
ANNOTATIONS VS. ABSTRACTS
Abstracts are the purely descriptive summaries often found at the beginning of scholarly journal articles or in periodical indexes. Annotations are descriptive and critical; they may describe the author's point of view, authority, or clarity and appropriateness of expression.
THE PROCESS
Creating an annotated bibliography calls for the application of a variety of intellectual skills: concise exposition, succinct analysis, and informed library research.
First, locate and record citations to books, periodicals, and documents that may contain useful information and ideas on your topic. Briefly examine and review the actual items. Then choose those works that provide a variety of perspectives on your topic.
Cite the book, article, or document using the appropriate style.
Write a concise annotation that summarizes the central theme and scope of the book or article. Include one or more sentences that (a) evaluate the authority or background of the author, (b) comment on the intended audience, (c) compare or contrast this work with another you have cited, or (d) explain how this work illuminates your bibliography topic.
CRITICALLY APPRAISING THE BOOK, ARTICLE, OR DOCUMENT
For guidance in critically appraising and analyzing the sources for your bibliography, see How to Critically Analyze Information Sources. For information on the author's background and views, ask at the reference desk for help finding appropriate biographical reference materials and book review sources.
SAMPLE ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ENTRY FOR A JOURNAL ARTICLE
The following example uses APA style (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition, 2019) for the journal citation:
Pennington, N. (2017). Tie strength and time: Mourning on social networking sites. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 61(1), 11-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2016.1273928
In this article, Pennington seeks to ascertain the role that the strength of tie (e.g., weak versus strong) and time (both in terms of time spent on social media and time since one’s friend has passed) play in finding support on the social networking site, Facebook. Pennington found, through a survey distributed to college students who had known someone who had died that they were Facebook friends with, that those who used Facebook regularly were more likely to find support on the site compared to those who had not. The study also found that relational closeness was related to visiting the Facebook profile of the deceased, but also was related to wanting the page removed from Facebook. Pennington concludes that there is no one right way to grieve, and more work is needed to ascertain the benefits and drawbacks of seeking support online while grieving.
Research Methods for Social Work by 
Research for Social Workers by To search for a specific journal, click on the A-Z list of journals link and type in the name of the journal. The record for the journal will indicate if it is online or print, along with the years that it is available. Below are some peer-reviewed journal examples:
Most of the Libraries databases will allow you to limit your search to peer-reviewed/scholarly journals, but if you need to double check on whether or not a journal is considered peer-reviewed, check on the following database:
1972-
Index to the literature of public policy, social policy, and the social sciences in general.
1895-
Indexes the literature of sociology and related disciplines.
1963-
Citations and abstracts from journal articles, books, and association papers in sociology.
Google Scholar searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. Google Scholar searches a variety of undisclosed academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. The full text of many items is freely available online, although in some instances abstracts with links to pay-per-view document delivery services are displayed.
Click on the UNLV Find Text link to see if the library subscribes to the publication.
When searching for government-related statistics or reports, you can use Google! Type in your keywords, then type site:.gov and you will locate a wide variety of federal, state, and local statistics and reports.
Below are some of the major social work-related government websites that provide reports, statistics and other updates:
Bibliography manager saves your citations and formats them into APA, MLA, or other styles.
RefWorks is a web-based bibliographic software package that enables you to:
From APA: Detailed instructions and examples from the 7th edition
from APA
Provides a DOI for an article citation when one is available.
Explains when to give credit to another person for their intellectual work (and how to do it correctly). Look for the "Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing" section on the left for examples of each.
