Recientemente I wrote a Twitter thread on the value of annotated bibliographies, which I wanted to turn into a blog post because I wanted to really strengthen my argument. As most of you who read my blog post know, I HAVE written about annotated bibliographies, literature reviews, systematic reviews, etc.
In my view, an annotated bibliography, a literature review and a systematic review are three important exercises in systematizing all the material we read. In my view, ABs, LRs and SRs have increasing degrees of complexity, as I show below.
This thread started at the request of one of my students, as the tweets below show.
He was looking for a way to show everything he had read. Personally, I don’t think a student should write a literature review BEFORE writing an annotated bibliography. Allow me to explain why. https://t.co/IhXJhBALzo
A literature review requires the student to digest it all.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 15, 2020
For me, producing an annotated bibliography and/or gnerating a bank (or set) of rhetorical precis (or a bank of article and book chapter summaries written in index cards) is the prerequisite step BEFORE writing the literature review.Often times, my students simply prefer to show me their Excel Dump.
IF a student feels more comfortable with a more detailed document than CSED, then I recommend that they do a series of rhetorical precis and THEN dump those notes either in a Word document, or that they write an AB.
My post on Rhetorical Precis. https://t.co/J9PhbjQzpm
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 15, 2020
Personally, I very strongly believe that Annotated Bibliographies are legitimate scholarly outputs. For one of my projects on water conflicts, I asked one of my research assistants to produce an annotated bibliography on the sociological concept of “framing” and “Frame Analysis”
… as a public service. I am overwhemed with deadlines, but I think that over the summer, I am going to produce an Annotated Bibliography on Comparative Ethnography.
What’s the value of ABs for other scholars? Anybody who downloads and reads my AB now has a STARTING POINT.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 15, 2020
Anybody who reads my AB on Comparative Ethnography can say “oh wow, there’s X author and Y author, and Z book and W chapter, and those are probably the first ones I should read”. It saves time for other scholars (including my own students).
I love the journal WIRES Water (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews) because that’s what they publish, exactly (systematic literature reviews). So does Geography Compass. So does Progress in Human Geography. So do the Annual Reviews of Political Science, etc. https://t.co/6ODRV09ibb
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 15, 2020
The intermediate step between writing an annotated bibliography (or building a deck of index cards on a topic, or a bank of rhetorical precis, or a set of Synthetic Notes) and producing the Literature Review is the DIGESTION, ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS of everything they’ve read.
“… in their CSED or annotated bibliography” and writing the literature review.
I have to finish 3 journal articles literally within the next week so I may not get to write that blog post (from AP to LR) soon, but at least this thread should help people make the transition.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 15, 2020
Overall, I strongly believe in the value of teaching our students to do Annotated Bibliographies, THEN Literature Reviews, THEN Systematic Reviews. My website has resources on each one of these, and the links above in the tweets shown should also work. Hopefully this post will be of use to instructors and students alike!
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