Annotated bibliographies are lists of citations to books, papers, articles, or reports, followed by a brief descriptive, reflective and/or evaluative paragraph – i.e., the annotation. With this type of activity, learners work with the relevance, accuracy, and quality of selected sources. Key elements of an annotated bibliography are: scope, complete bibliographic information, concise summary of each work, relevant analysis/commentary and content consistency.
Educators can ask learners to use digital tools such as:
- Scribbr’s free Citation Generator for the creation and management of annotated bibliography in APA or MLA style. With this tool, learners can generate a formatted annotated bibliography, select the source type, define the main fields, and add their annotations;
- or Bugherd to annotate websites.