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Annotated Bibliographies

Formatting Annotated Bibliographies

  • Title your annotated bibliography "Annotated Bibliography." Make the title centered on the page. Confirm title requirements with your instructor.
  • Format your sources according to the guidelines for a typical Chicago/Turabian style Bibliography or Reference List.
  • According to the Chapter 14.64 of the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition, "Annotations may simply follow the publication details (sometimes in brackets if only a few entries are annotated), or they may start a new line (and are often indented from the left margin)." So, ask your instructor what formatting guidelines they would like you to follow for annotations in terms of line breaks and indentations. 
  • Generally, annotations should be a paragraph long. Confirm length and spacing 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, Kadir and Gür E. Güraksin. "Determining Middle School Students' Perceptions of the Concept of Artificial Intelligence: A Metaphor Analysis." Participatory Educational Research 9, no. 2(2022): 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.