An annotated bibliography is essentially a list of resources that you
might use regarding a particular topic, and brief summaries of those sources.
These summaries can be as short as 30 words, 50 words, 100 words, 150 words.
I might have seen some annotated bibliographies that each
annotation is 250 words.
So an annotated bibliography is really just a list of sources that
a writer annotates, which is describes or summarizes what that source is.
You see them in a myriad of ways throughout scholarly writing.
The one that comes to mind to me first is at the end of some books,
they'll list a lot of resources that readers can turn to if they
want to continue thinking about a particular idea.
And a particular author will have annotated those, and that enables his or
her readers to identify really quickly which ones are going to be more or
less relevant to them.
Another occasion where you see an annotated bibliography is
in the research process.
In preparing for a longer kind of research paper, writers will
often prepare an annotated bibliography to track their thinking and their research.
And then they search that anno bib, it's called an anno bib, with someone else so
that that respondent can clearly see if the kind of the map of
the field is as full or rich as it maybe should be.
So there are a variety of purposes.
In terms of elements, the elements of an annotated bibliography look
different depending on the context in which you're writing and
the occasion that kind of inspired it.
Sometimes it can be straight summary.
Sometimes it can be summary along with kind of evaluation, right,
like whether the source does a good job at doing something or
fails to mention something, kind of like a critical review.
And sometimes there can be another element in there where a writer will write
an annotated bibliography and discuss how they see that source as being applicable
or potentially useful or valuable, or not, for his or her own writing project.