Annotated Bibliography Exercise for Marine Reserves Topic

Doing research in geography often requires you to summarise and make sense of other people’s work. One of the techniques researchers (and students) use to help collate research material is an annotated bibliography.

Part 1 – will commence in laboratory classes in week 3, and will require teams to combine their individual contributions into a complete Annotated Bibliography for their topic.

An annotated bibliography has two parts:

• Alist of reference materials, such as books, journal articles, and websites in which you provide author, title, and publication details for each  This is the ‘bibliography and Ashort review of that item – ie, the ‘annotation’ (Hay (2006).

Annotated bibliographies are typically presented in alphabetical order (by authors’ surname). Each individual review might be approximately 250 words in length.

The purpose of an annotated bibliography is to provide an overview of the literature available for a specific topic. Annotated bibliographies can be very useful in helping other researchers (and students) to decide whether a resource is worth following up. They can also play an important role in providing relevant material for the literature review, which forms part of all research reports.

Each Team will be assigned a topic relating to marine reserves – see the Coursebuilder Your task is to find one journal article (not a book or website) relating to your Team’s  An easy way to do this is to use the search function in Google Scholar: use the advance search ? enabled by the downward arrow on the far right ? to search for exact phrases or words or use “to search for specific words”.

It is most likely that lots of articles will come  Carefully read through the articles’ abstract and key words (not just the title) to see whether it is relevant to your Team’s topic.

Eachmember of the Team must have a different article and so at this step you should  Please note that you will not receive a mark for this exercise if two or more people in a Team use the same article.

Donot proceed unless everyone in your Team has a unique article that is relevant to the topic in question.
Read the article ? see the advice in Effective Reading below – and take notes. Then write an annotatedbibliography for this article of 100  This should follow the format of the examples above and must be written in your own words and not contain any quotes from the authors. Please include 2?5 key words (note: these are not included in the word count).

Uploadyour work to Canvas by the due  Your individual work will be worth 1.5% of the final course grade ? see ‘Marking Rubric’ below.

Annotated Bibliography

Printa copy of your work and bring this to the Laboratory class in week  In Part 2 your individual piece will be combined with the rest of our Team’s to create an annotated bibliography, which will be made available online to the whole class.

So you have found a suitable article but where do you start? Reading journal articles can be pretty tough going at times ? even when you are interested in the topic. The first thing to realise is that, at least initially, you don’t have to read the whole article to get a good idea of what it is about. Most journal articles follow a common structure and you can use this to help you. Typically you will find the following sections:

Abstract
Introduction
Background
Methods
Results
Discussion/Conclusion

Before you start reading make sure you can answer the question, why am I reading this article?

Start with the abstract. It provides a concise description of the research and will briefly cover the purpose and objectives of the study, the research design and a summary of the findings. An abstract may also hint at research gaps and the potential impact of the study. The abstract should provide you with a good overview of the article and from this you should be able to determine whether it is relevant to your topic/research question. Remember that the abstract will leave out a lot of details and so if the article is relevant you will need to read further in order to complete the task.

To find the purpose and objectives of the paper read the last paragraph following the literature review in the background section. It will often start with “In this paper…”

The first paragraph of the discussion section is also useful as it often summarizes the overall findings. The discussion section will likely also cover the implications and limitations of the research.

The methods section will provide information about the research design, data sources and study sites/populations. Reading this section will provide context for the results.

Once you have a general idea about what the article is about you can go back through and re?read it in more detail. Keep your reading focussed and remember to ask yourself why am I reading this article? What information am I looking for or what question am I trying to answer?

In recording the bibliographic details of the article you read please use either the Harvard or APA referencing systems. Once again more information is provided on the Exercise 2 ? Part 1 CourseBuilder page.

Please type out your annotated bibliography in word and submit to Canvas.

Your individual contribution to the Annotated Bibliography in Part 1 will be marked out of 5 using the following rubric. This will be weighted in Canvas to contribute 1.5% to your final grade.