An annotated bibliography is a list of scholarly sources you have studied with a brief summary of each entry's central argument and its relevance to your research. Depending on your assignment, this can be a part of a more extensive research paper or a stand-alone academic document recapping what you have learned about the topic.
Writing annotated bibliographies is beneficial, as it makes you read and process each source more carefully and develop a comprehensive view of your topic. Extensive annotated bibliographies are also helpful for other researchers working in the same field.
There are different types of annotated bibliography assignments. Some will require you to summarize without providing your evaluation. Others will want you to analyze similarities and differences between the sources, notice patterns, and comment on them. Some assignments may also ask you to preface your bibliography with a short explanation of your research's scope and reasons for selecting these particular sources.
This makes annotated bibliography one of the most labor-intense academic assignments that requires a lot of planning and time budgeting.
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Brainstorming Ideas and Choosing a Topic for Annotated Bibliography
So, what is a good topic for an annotated bibliography? Before you start selecting sources, here are the questions to ask yourself:
- - What questions am I seeking to answer with my research?
- - What kind of sources do I need? (academic books, scholarly articles, websites, periodicals, etc.)
- - What are the essential studies in my field?
One of the challenges of choosing a topic for an annotated bibliography is its broadness. All tips on coming up with essay topics include the suggestion to narrow it down. However, with a bibliography, it's another way around. Most often than not, you should scale it up. Otherwise, you would not be able to find sufficient material. Cast your nets wide and then sieve through what you have found.
Also, unlike very specific research topics usually given in the form of a question, most annotated bibliography paper topics can be very general (for example, "Technology and education"). If that is the case, define your research purpose more precisely by asking a series of questions yourself. For example, "How has technology changed education?", "What are the milestones of this process?", "How education influenced technological advancement, and so on.
This difficulty is also a blessing in disguise since it allows you to refocus the topic on the go depending on the sources you find. Sometimes you start your study with certain expectations but instead stumble upon gaps in knowledge and questions that make you pivot your research in another direction.
Topics for Annotated Bibliography by Subject
To prompt your brainstorming, here are some sample topics to explore. For your convenience, we have divided our annotated bibliography topics list by subject areas. However, being broad, some of them can pertain to more than one field and dwell on the intersection of several disciplines.
Annotated bibliography topics for psychology
- - The influence of social media on the mental health of preteens
- - Eating disorders among Asian Americans
- - Short-term memory, its functions, and controls
- - Infantile amnesia
- - Juvenile delinquency and childhood adversity
Annotated bibliography nursing topics
- The use of multimedia in public health
- - Concussions in football
- - Current dental public health issues
- - Ethical dilemmas in nursing practice
- - Evolution of health care systems
Annotated bibliography topics for education
- - Gamification techniques and their benefits
- - Raising achievement in science in K12
- - Learning activities for young children
- - Trends and theories of educational practices
- - Students with learning disabilities in higher education
Annotated bibliography topics for English
- - Interpersonal meanings of texts in the English language
- - Second language acquisition
- - Technicality and abstraction in language
- - Teaching and learning polysemous lexical items
- - Speech generation and speech recognition technology
Annotated bibliography topics for literature
- - Poetic devices in Beowulf
- - Shakespeare and the Renaissance scene
- - The concept of "saudade" in Portuguese poetry
- - Orientalism in European literature
- - Feminist criticism of African literature
Annotated bibliography topics for sociology
- - Intercultural dialogue and its challenges
- - Capitalism vs. Socialism
- - USA social trends of the past 100 years
- - Human values and social transformations
- - Frameworks for understanding vulnerable populations
Annotated bibliography on management and business topics
- - Hazard assessment in the workplace
- - Johnson & Johnson's green initiatives
- - The unique strategy of L'Oreal
- - Managing communication, knowledge, and information in a company
- - Impact of social networks on business
Annotated bibliography history topics
- - "Great person theory" as an interpretation of history
- - The history of the Continental Congress
- - Christianity and slavery
- - Cuban Missile crisis
- - The place of biography and memoir in historical science
Easy Annotated Bibliography Topics as a Final Titbit
Sometimes, your assignment aims to introduce you to the annotated bibliography as a format of academic writing rather than explore a concrete problem. If that's the case, here are some good topics for an annotated bibliography with plenty of readily available resources to practice writing this type of paper.
- - Adverse effects of alcohol and drug abuse
- - Effects of overprotective parenting
- - Leadership strategies
- - Impact of Vietnam war on American culture
- - Sexualization of teenagers in media
- - Social issues in rap music
- - Globalization and its effects on employment and diversity
- - Civil right movement
- - Race and ethnicity
- - Gender ethics and equality
- - Reflection of social problems in pop culture
- - Technology factor in obesity
- - Social capital and social media
- - American military culture and violence
- - Classism in the USA
