What is an annotated bibliography?
Generally speaking, an annotated bibliography is a bibliography with some notes amounting to a few sentences. The bibliographic entry itself should be complete, much as the references are on the reference list I gave you. The two most troublesome entries for earth science tend to be papers in an edited volume and a paper in a volume that is part of a series. For a paper in an edited volume you need the author(s) and title of the paper and the editor(s), publisher, and title of the book. If the paper is in a volume that is part of a series (things like a paper in a DNAG volume, a state geological survey memoir, etc.), then in addition to the edited volume info you should add the series name and volume number.
As an example:
Lubetkin, L.K.C., and M.M. Clark, Late Quaternary activity along the Lone Pine Fault, eastern California, Geol. Soc. Am. Bull., 100 (5), 755-766, 1988.
Documents the geomorphology of scarps and the distribution of scarp height near Lone Pine, interpreting variations as the product of three separate earthquakes each producing about 1-2 m of vertical offset. Offset of an ancient channel of Lone Pine Creek and a younger debris flow reveals right-lateral slip in these events of 4-6 m. Dating of the fan indicates late Quaternary slip rates of about 0.4-1.3 mm/yr on the Lone Pine Fault and possibly 0.7-2.2 mm/yr across the Owens Valley Fault system.
What order should things be in?
Please put all the bibliographic entries for a single topic in alphabetical order (by last name of the first author). When you have multiple entries by the same first author, by convention you first list the ones where this is the sole author from oldest to youngest, then the ones with just two authors, alphabetical by the second author and, if same pair of authors, oldest to youngest, and then all the papers with three or more authors organized by date. If you have multiple papers with the same citation, use letters to distinguish one from another (e.g., Jones and Smith, 2000a, Jones and Smith, 2000b). This is helpful should you be mentioning papers in your summary or citing figures from these paper in your illustrations in the guidebook.
What style of reference should I use?
Ideally you would use either AGU or GSA style; there are some others out there, but these dominate earth science. (My version above is a modified AGU format with the year pushed to the end and the issue number of the journal included in parentheses). AGU's author's guide includes detailed information. GSA has a set of example references on their website.
AGU: Dixon, T. H., S. Robaudo, J. Lee, and M. C. Reheis (1995), Constraints on present-day Basin and Range deformation from space geodesy, Tectonics, 14, 755-772, doi:10.1029/95TC00931.
GSA: Dixon, T. H., Robaudo, S., Lee, J., and Reheis, M. C., 1995, Constraints on present-day Basin and Range deformation from space geodesy: Tectonics, v. 14, p. 755-772, doi:10.1029/95TC00931.
What about DOI numbers? And where are page numbers on AGU articles from 2001 to 2012?
Over the past decade, DOIs (digital object identifiers) have come in to vogue. The cool thing about a DOI is that there is a central database: to find a publication by DOI, you can just append it to http://dx.doi.org/ in a browser--so http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/95TC00931 will get you the Dixon paper above. Increasingly DOIs are required in most professional applications, but many older journal articles now assigned DOIs lack them in their original form (or on pdf versions). DOIs are pretty essential for AGU publications from 2002-2012 when they abandoned page numbers and the DOI is actually the most robust way of locating the paper. AGU does provide a paper number for each paper that should replace the pages in the citation style above, but frankly the paper number is of little use. For the Journal of Geophysical Research after page numbers were reinstituted, you need the full name of the flavor of JGR (e.g., Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth) (originally the page numbers of JGR covered all the versions, which is no longer true). Note that many papers shown as in press on journal websites already have DOIs assigned to them, so these can be cited before publication.
What references do I include?
Include all the papers that you will take figures from for the field guide and all the papers you looked at that bear on your topics. This includes papers from the reference list! Don't leave them off simply because they were listed there--there was no annotation on the list I provided.
What is the purpose of the annotated bibliography?
There are a number of possible uses for the bibliography:
For this first cut, (1) and (2) are most important. For a bibliography accompanying the field trip materials, (3) is most important.
What should be in the notes?
You want to be terse and specific. Generic comments like "discusses this region," "explores the geological history" or repetitions of the title are not helpful. Tell what is special or important about the paper: "detailed maps of the core complex," "integrates geochemical, petrologic, and paleomagnetic constraints to reveal unusual aspects of this intrusion." If there is a controversy note where this paper fits in, e.g., "advocates more than 3000 km of displacement of Insular Superterrane from paleomagnetic observations of Cretaceous plutons." Editorializing is tricky: you often reveal more about your background than the paper you have read. In general you should err on the side of objectivity, but occasionally a brief comment can help the user: "a murky read," "a most convincing interpretation," "seems to presume their conclusions rather than allow them to come from their observations."
Of course the detail of comments will vary. Many journal articles have quite specific points that can be well summarized in the annotation (as for the example above). Books are harder; here again the guiding principle should reflect why you chose to read (parts of) the book at all: "provides a handy overview to the geologic history of the region from a dominantly stratigraphic perspective," "although lacking supporting detail, shows a fairly plausible overview of the evolution of the region useful in relating more detailed journal papers to the problems at hand," "provides a comprehensive bibliography to the literature on many points relating to the geochemistry of the region." In some cases, specific numerical data might be appropriate (as with the example provided above).
How polished should the first draft be?
It should be as complete as you can make it: it should be good enough to be your final draft, in your opinion. A sloppy "rough" job does nobody any favors: the comments you get back are apt to be ones you could make yourself and more insightful comments about things you might have really overlooked would be missing.
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Please send mail to cjones@colorado.edu if you encounter any problems or have suggestions.
C. H. Jones | CIRES | Dept. of Geological Sciences | Univ. of Colorado at Boulder
Last modified at January 31, 2020 5:02 PM