Research Paper 03.1: Bibliographic Information

As part of your research project you will create an annotated bibliography to show the trail of your research and demonstrate your ability to evaluate your source material. There are a few advantages of the annotated bibliography, including:

• ready-made list of citation information for your source material, easing retrieval
• brief descriptions of your source material, clarifying the content
• assessments of strengths and weaknesses of your source material, assessing quality
• foundation of works cited page

Plus:

• annotation provides clear evidence of your effort as a searcher
• annotation provides clear evidence of your evaluation of source material

Mini-Objective 4: Gather bibliography information on your source material in a single document

Any document of bibliographic material serves a specific and crucial function in any research project: listing source material so it may be used again in the future. Citation information is a record of sequenced data points about source material that describes it and enables anyone to locate it again. However, there are some things that you need to consider to truly understand citation and its value. Each data point describing the source follows an order ranked by significance. In simple terms, it includes the following data points:

1. Author’s name
2. Title*
3. Publisher*
4. Year of publication

Both Title and Publisher become more complicated descriptive pieces of data about your source material, possibly requiring additional data points. So you have to ask yourself a a key question:

• What is the nature of the source? Meaning is it a book, magazine, encyclopedia, etc.
  • The answer to this question…
    • determines the sequence of data points that describe the source.
    • more importantly, suggests the type and quality of information you are likely to find in the source.

• Example – Book with One Author
  • Author’s last name, Author’s first name. Title. Place of publication: publisher, publication date.
    • This is the simplest sequence of data points, ranked in order of significance.
    • The Title and Publisher data points are direct and require no additional description. 

• Example – Reference Database
  • Author’s last name, Author’s first name. “Title of article.” Source. Publisher, year. Reproduced in Name of Database. Library where database was accessed, location of library. Date of access.
    • This sequence is far more complex, requiring additional description for the Title and Publisher data points
    • Title* has split and become:
      • “Title of article” – because your source material is a selection from a longer source
      • Source – because the longer source is item that would need to be identified
    • Publisher* has split and become:
      • Publisher – because this is the original publishing company for the print version of your source material
      • Name of Database – because this is a database for print versions of source material from potentially different publishing companies

In many ways, bibliographic information and citation is like tagging on the web. You can describe a photograph with tags, words that define or characterize the content of the picture. Tagging has become commonplace on the web for photos, blog postings, and discussion forums, especially with sites like Facebook and MySpace. The only difference is that tagging is random, with no formal structure; whereas bibliographic information is logical, with a formal structure (see list above).

Now, you will find not all the data points are available for every source. This is common. In fact, it is one of the reasons why there is a formal, logical structure for reliability. Always include as many data points as you have and keep them in order. That way anyone will likely be able to locate the source again.

For those of you that want the sample annotated bibliography to use as a template, simply download it to your computer or network drive. Take note of the sample, MLA formats the first line of the bibliographic entry flush to the left margin and all additional lines are indented. Also, all bibliographic information should be in alphabetic order, based on the first word of each entry.