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Annotated Bibliographies

Formatting Annotated Bibliographies

  • Title your annotated bibliography either "Annotated Bibliography" or "Annotated List of Works Cited." Center the title on the page. Confirm title requirements with your instsructor.
  • Format your sources according to the guidelines for a typical MLA Works Cited page
  • On the line beneath each entry, write your annotation. Indent the annotation an inch from the start of the entry. 
  • Generally, annotations should be a paragraph long. If they are longer, make sure to indent each of the following paragraphs. Do not add a space between the paragraphs. Confirm length requirements with your instructor.

Writing Annotations

  • Always check with your instructor to confirm whether they would like your annotation to be summative (describing a source's content), evaluative (evaluating the usefulness or relevance of the source to your work), or for it to include both description and evaluation.
  • According to Chapter 5.132 in the MLA Handbook, annotated bibliographies "should not rehash minor details, cite evidence, quote the author, or recount steps in an argument."
  • Always check with your instructor to confirm the required length of annotations, and whether you should use phrases or complete sentences.

Sample Annotated Bibliography Entry

Demir, Kadir, and Gür E. Güraksin. "Determining Middle School Students' Perceptions of the Concept of Artificial Intelligence: A Metaphor Analysis." Participatory Educational Research, vol. 9, no. 2, 2022, pp. 297-312, https://doi.org/10.17275/per.22.41.9.2.

In this article, Demir and Güraksin report on a study completed in 2019-2020 in Turkey. The researchers collected data on 339 middle school students' perceptions of AI. While this study was completed before the rise of popular generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, it can still give me important context and background on middle school students' perspectives on AI and could serve as a point of comparison to current attitudes.