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Annotated Bibliographies

Formatting Annotated Bibliographies

  • Title your annotated bibliography either "Annotated Bibliography" or "[Topic]: Annotated Bibliography." Make the title bold and centered on the page. Confirm title requirements with your instructor.
  • Format your sources according to the guidelines for a typical APA References Page.
  • On the line beneath each entry, write your annotation. Indent the entire annotation 0.5 inch from the left margin, as you would any lines in the citation after the first line. The first line of the annotation should not be indented more than any of the other lines. 
  • Generally, annotations should be a paragraph long. If they are longer, make sure to indent each of the following paragraphs 1 inch from the left margin. 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.
  • Always check with your instructor to confirm the required length of annotations, and whether you should use phrases or complete sentences.

Sample Annotated Bibliography

Demir, K., & Güraksin, G. E. (2022). Determining middle school students' perceptions of the concept of artificial intelligence: A metaphor analysis. Participatory Educational Research, 9(2), 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.

[If you were writing a second paragraph, it would be indented like this one is].