JOUR J620: Media Coverage of Sports

The AP Stylebook Online is used for most classes in Journalism.

It is searchable and it’s updated live as the AP adds or changes its style listings, ensuring that you always have the most up-to-date rules and tips.

According to the IUPUI Student Code of Conduct, plagiarism is defined as presenting someone else’s work, including the work of other students, as one’s own. Any ideas or materials taken from another source for either written or oral use must be fully acknowledged, unless the information is common knowledge. What is considered “common knowledge” may differ from course to course.

    a. A student must not adopt or reproduce ideas, opinions, theories, formulas, graphics, or pictures of another person without acknowledgment.

    b. A student must give credit to the originality of others and acknowledge indebtedness whenever:

         1. Directly quoting another person’s actual words, whether oral or written;

         2. Using another person’s ideas, opinions, or theories;

         3. Paraphrasing the words, ideas, opinions, or theories of others, whether oral or written;

         4. Borrowing facts, statistics, or illustrative material; or

         5. Offering materials assembled or collected by others in the form of projects or collections without acknowledgment.

Citation management tools allow you to keep citations, full-text articles, and other research resources organized in one place. These tools can also be used to format your bibliographies and the citations in your papers according to the appropriate style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) To use these tools, you should be familiar with the target citation style in order to input information correctly and notice any errors in your bibliography. Please contact a subject librarian for further assistance.

EndNote is software that helps manage citations for bibliographies. Includes an add-in for Microsoft Word. For questions about EndNote, please contact your subject librarian.

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. It includes a Microsoft Word plug-in and web importer. For questions about Mendeley, please contact Rachel Hinrichs, the Mendeley specialist librarian, or your subject librarian.

Zotero is a free Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, cite, and share your research sources. It includes an add-in for Microsoft Word. For questions, please contact Ted Polley, the Zotero specialist librarian, or your subject librarian.

Flowchart from The Literature Review (2009) by Machi and McEvoy

Detailed description of, "Literature Review Process"

NOTE: This is general information about annotated bibliographies. Always defer to your professor and the course syllabus as there may be specific requirements for the class that differ from this information.

What is a bibliography?

A bibliography is a list of sources (books, journals, etc.) you used for researching your topic. Bibliographies are sometimes called "References" or "Works Cited." A bibliography includes the bibliographic information (i.e., the author, title, publisher, etc.).

What is an annotation?

An annotation is a summary and/or evaluation.

What is an annotated bibliography?

An annotated bibliography includes a summary and evaluation of each of the sources you used for researching your topic. Your annotations should do the following.

• Summarize: What are the main arguments? What is the point of this book or article? What topics are covered? If someone asked what this article/book is about, what would you say?

           For more help, see the Purdue OWL's page on paraphrasing sources.

• Evaluate: Is it a useful source? How does it compare with other sources in your bibliography? Is the information reliable? Is this source biased or objective? What is the goal of this source?     
• Reflect: Once you've summarized and evaluated a source, you need to ask how it fits into your research. Was this source helpful to you? How does it help you shape your argument? How can you use this source in your research project? Has it changed how you think about your topic?

How long should the annotations be?

Generally, annotations are one paragraph, with a goal of concise and explicative annotations. Usually one or two sentences summarizing or describing content, one or two sentences providing an evaluation, and a final sentence or two on your reflection.

What is the format?

For the bibliographic information, cite your sources according to the format required. Whichever format you use, be consistent!

The annotations for each source are written in paragraph form. The paragraph should contain a statement of the work's major thesis, from which the rest of the sentences can develop.

How should it be organized?

Usually annotated bibliographies are arranged alphabetically although sometimes they are organized chronologically, by format (books, journals, etc...), or by topic.

Why write an annotated bibliography?

To learn about your topic: Writing an annotated bibliography is excellent preparation for a research project. Collecting sources for a bibliography is useful, but when you have to write annotations for each source, you're forced to read each source more carefully. You begin to read more critically instead of just collecting information.

To help you formulate a thesis: The purpose of research is to state and support a thesis. So a very important part of research is developing a thesis that is debatable, interesting, and current. Writing an annotated bibliography can help you gain a good perspective on what is being said about your topic. By reading and responding to a variety of sources on a topic, you'll start to see what the issues are, what people are arguing about, and you'll then be able to develop your own point of view.

Adapted from the Purdue OWL's "Annotated Bibliographies" page and the Lucy Scribner Library, "Writing an Annotated Bibliography."