Annotated Bibliography

An Annotated Bibliography is a set of sources with a brief summary. The student will be required to find five sources, at least one primary, about a civilization of their choosing from the previous weeks’ material.  Please see the assignment section for more details on what is required.

Instructions.

1) The student will pick a civilization that was covered in week 1 – week 3.

2) The student will search for four academic secondary sources on this civilization.

An academic source is a trustworthy source that is not open author. Wikipedia is an example of an open author source, where the author cannot be verified. For this reason, Wikipedia could not be used as an academic source.  Encyclopedias, even closed author, are usually not included as an academic source because they are too general. For this reason, the sources that a student chooses must not be an encyclopedia or a dictionary. Journal articles and books are the best sources here, but there are some academically acceptable websites. Websites take some verification though, you must make sure the author or creator is listed, so that you can verify that they are an expert on the subject.

If a multiple websites are chosen, they must be from different domain names entirely.  IE:  If a student  used www.charlesI.com,  even if a specific section on wars, they could not use another section of the website www.charlesI.com.

3) The student will search for one primary source on this civilization.

A primary source is original contemporary material from the civilization you have chosen. An example of this would be a treatise from one of the civilization’s philosophers, a letter from the king of that civilization, a poem or even a work of art from the civilization. 

4) The student will create a proper APA formatted reference line for this source.

5)  Following the APA formatted reference, the student will summarize the source in a paragraph. It is not expected that students read whole books on a subject, but they should find book reviews, abstracts, or quickly analyze the book to give a brief summary.  For websites, a comprehensive description of all aspects of that website should be written. Always cite the home page for the website, not individual pages within the overall website. 

6) Finally, the student should write in a few sentences the importance of the source or the usefulness of the source.  For example, what can we learn from using this source?