LibGuides: Introduction to Research: Annotating Articles

Annotating Articles

For this course, you must annotate an article about an issue facing college students. Below is a guide on how to effectively annotate an article. The previous page in this module went over APA citation style, which is required for the annotation for your assignment!

Download the Creating an Annotation guide

Creating an Annotation

An annotation is a brief descriptive and evaluative paragraph that goes beyond a mere summary of a source. The annotation identifies the accuracy, relevancy, and quality of a source, often as it pertains to your research topic or assignment. This worksheet will help you in building a source annotation.

The Citation

Always start your annotation with the full citation of the source. Consult your APA Citation Guide for help on building your citation.

The Annotation

Answering the following questions will help you to write an annotation for any given source.

What is the article about? What are the key themes presented by the author?
While an annotation shouldn’t be just a summary of the text, understanding the key themes of the source will help you understand if it is relevant to your topic.
What major conclusions or arguments are made by the author?
Does this source support your topic or perhaps it offers an opposing view-point? Being able to identify the major conclusions or arguments in a source are important to understanding how it related to your topic.
What supporting evidence or arguments are given by the author? Are they convincing; why or why not?
Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a source’s evidence are important for judging the quality and accuracy of a source. The stronger the evidence, often the more reliable a source is.
How does this source relate to your topic? How does it relate to other sources that you’ve found?
It is important that a source you use relates to some aspect of your topic, but often being able to describe ho wit relates to other sources you are using can help to give the source context in the broader narrative of your topic.

Now that you’ve answered the questions above, piece together your answers into a coherent and well-formed paragraph. Congratulations! You have just created an annotation!