Remember to put requests in early so they arrive in time for you to read them and use them in your assignments.

Your annotated bibliography, though, must go into detail.  For example, one group included the sentence, “Yes, the information is accurate.”  How do you know it’s accurate?  Why can you trust it?  Your annotated bibliography must answer the question, “Why?”.  It must say something like, “I know the information is accurate because the author has cited all of her research and included a bibliography.”  Or something like, “I know the information is accurate because the author explains his research methods and includes all the data he gathered, and his conclusions fit with that data.”

A sentence such as “I know it’s reliable because it’s in an academic journal” will not be accepted.

These annotations are not just to allow you to show you know how to find scholarly journal articles.  They are also to get you to examine sources critically and thoroughly.  A good example of this is from Group 6: “We are not exactly sure about his credentials, however he did write two other articles on the same subject which gives him some credibility.”  The group knew the article was from a scholarly journal, but they went one step farther and critically examined the author’s credentials.  Another example from Group 6: “This author uses many examples from different court cases therefore it shows that it is reliable.”  This last sentence answered the “Why?”.

• Using quotation marks and adding keywords using AND narrows your search.

• The first article in your results list may have the keyword(s) you searched, but may not be on topic. Be sure to read the abstract and, if necessary, scan the full text of the article. Articles are listed by date. You may have to scroll through a page or 2 before finding relevant articles.

• Use truncation to find alternate endings of search terms. Be careful not to truncate terms too early. For example, if you truncated “banned” as ban*, you would get articles with the term “ban” but also articles with the terms bands, bandicoots, bananas, etc.

• Brainstorm synonyms and related terms to expand your search. Use the Subjects and/or Thesaurus in the database, too. The terms the database uses may not be the terms we think of in our heads.

• Checking the scholarly/peer-reviewed limit will limit your results to articles from scholarly journals. But, not all articles from scholarly journals are appropriate for your research paper. For example, many journals contain book reviews, letters to the editor and short summaries of previous research. Book reviews and letters to the editor will not be accepted on the bibliography assignment.

• Once you find an article from a scholarly/peer-reviewed journal, you still have to do an evaluation. You still have to explain the accuracy, reliability, authority, etc of the article. A sentence such as “I know this source is reliable because it’s from a scholarly journal” will not be accepted on the bibliography assignment.

Find resources for your annotated bibliography and research paper to the right under “Pages.”

If you have any questions, please contact me or the librarian on duty at the reference desk. Our contact information is also to the right under “Pages.”

See a list of all Crown Library class pages:
http://crownlibraryclasspages.wordpress.com/