Research Proposal and Annotated Bibliography

Most research essays involve two particular documents that help guide, manage, and report on the on-going research process. Those two documents are the research proposal and the annotated bibliography, detailed below.

Research Proposal

A research proposal is a brief document—only one typed page—that summarizes the preliminary ideas and current progress regarding your research essay. Your purpose is to formalize your plan for research and present it to your instructor for feedback. Your research proposal should be in complete sentences and paragraphs (and lists of information where appropriate), and should use MLA format.

A research proposal should address all of the following (the order of this information is allowed to change):

1. Briefly summarize the subject and its issues, controversies, or context.
2. Briefly explain of the significance or relevance of researching this subject.
3. State your main research question about the subject.
4. List any sub-questions related to your main research question (consider who, what, when, where, why, and how).
5. State your working thesis.
6. State the kinds of sources you plan to seek, or the types you have found, and/or your plan for finding sources.

Remember that your working thesis is not set in stone. You can and should change your working thesis throughout the research writing process if the information you find does not support your original thesis. Never try to force information into fitting your argument. For example, suppose your working thesis is this: “Mars cannot support life-forms.” Yet a week into researching your subject, suppose you find an article in the New York Times detailing new findings of bacteria under the Martian surface. Instead of trying to force that information into fitting your argument, such as arguing that bacteria are not life forms, you might instead alter your thesis to something like, “Mars cannot support complex life-forms.”

Below is an example of a research proposal from a student, which addresses all of the above:

Annotated Bibliography

A bibliography is a list of all your sources and along with their citation information (in MLA format, the Works Cited page is a type of bibliography). An annotation is a note, description, and/or commentary on an item. So an annotated bibliography is a list of sources with notes, descriptions, and/or commentary on each source.

When engaging in a research writing project, creating and updating an annotated bibliography is extremely useful. It can function as your hub for collecting sources (so that you don’t lose or forget about them), as your reminder of what the source is about (so that you don’t have to re-read the whole piece), and as your aid in the writing process when selecting which sources are best to include where (so that you don’t have to memorize all of them while drafting and revising). An annotated bibliography can also help you avoid accidental plagiarism, which sometimes happens when students forget the sources of ideas or sentences they use in their essays.

Annotated bibliographies are thus a common assignment in courses that use research writing, even in alternate forms, such as the common high-school assignment of “note cards” (which are essentially annotated bibliographies on separate cards).

Whether or not you are assigned to create an annotated bibliography along with your research essay, you are wise to start one as soon as you read your first useful source. And you should keep adding to it and updating it as your research continues.

Take a look at an example entry for an annotated bibliography:

Here are more details on the parts of an annotated bibliography and how to create them (along with the example pieces from the above entry):

I. Cite the source. Create the full Works Cited entry in MLA format that you would use as the citation in your essay. For online sources, including the full URL here can save a lot of time when returning to the source during drafting, revising, and editing.

II. Start a short paragraph below the citation for the annotation, and address the following:

1. Describe the source and its publication. Also mention its context, such as what it is a part of or is connected to, or how recent or relevant it is.

2. Summarize what the source is about. Include a brief mention of a detail or two that might be useful to your research project.

3. Discuss relevant information about the author, such as credentials, experience, reputation, or other publications.

4. Discuss the source’s purpose, bias, style, and/or intended audience.

5. Adjust the information you discuss in this paragraph as needed for the source, the research project, and/or the annotated bibliography assignment. For instance, you might wish to include a note to yourself about how you plan to use this source in your essay. Or the source might lack a stated author, which requires you to discuss the institution that produced the source instead. Also note that the above information does not have to remain in this order strictly.

To format your entire annotated bibliography with all of your entries, use standard MLA page layout. This means to include the standard first-page identifying information in the upper left (name, professor, course, date), a title (typically the words Annotated Bibliography), and alphabetical order for the entries. One common exception to this format is to use single-spaced entries, and leaving double-spacing between them. Find out from your instructor whether either is spacing style is preferred, or whether both are acceptable.