EDHS 4111/5111 – Epidemiological Principles in Health Promotion

Graduate Student Annotated Bibliography Instructions

For your term paper you will develop an evaluative annotated bibliography using 10 peer‐reviewed original research articles focusing on your epidemiological topic of interest.

Your bibliography should have an introductory section outlining the problem, followed by a series of annotated journal references listed alphabetically and in APA format, concluding with a summary section.

Please make use of the scoring template. I will use this template to score your bibliography. I have placed a copy of the template below for your convenience.

I have posted two sample bibliographies from another graduate course to give you an idea of how others created their annotated bibliographies.

Some pitfalls from past semesters:

Failing to include the introduction and summary sections. Each of these sections is worth 20 points and so failing to include one or both results in a serious reduction in the total score.

Failing to include all 10 articles in the bibliography. Yes…this has happened. If you write your annotations separately as you read and critique your articles it is possible to forget to copy and paste all 10 into the final document. Check the number twice before submission.

Please write in complete sentences. Sounds funny to say this but I believe this pitfall is also related to writing annotations separately as you read and critique your articles. Often, we make quick notes on the points we want to present in the final paper and forget to edit the notes when we copy and paste.

Example: “No explain sampling procedure”… should have been “The authors did not provide any information on their sampling procedures.” Things get hectic at the end of the term. Running a grammar check on your word processor should catch these things for you.

Forgetting to sort the article annotations in alphabetical order. If we were writing a formal literature review for an article, we would present our cited articles grouped by focus/time. However, please note, for this bibliography, we will present the articles in alphabetical order as we do for a reference list.

A silent voice. After presenting the article topic, importance, methods, etc., you can give your informed opinion on the relevance of the article to your topic.

Your opinion is important.

Does the article focus on a component of or around your topic? Please say so.

Does this author disagree with or support a conclusion found in other articles in your bibliography? This is important information, and you can feel free to note these points.

Was the article not the best you have ever read? Did the author fail to provide important information? Then please state your reason for including the piece in your bibliography. For example, “The author did not give enough information on how the sample was chosen or (other important points that you wanted to know about). However, the author had a unique perspective on my topic. I had not considered this perspective or read about it in the other articles, therefore I decided to include the piece on that basis.”

Or something like that: whatever makes the most sense to you. Your reason(s) for including a less than stellar article is important. Many articles have excellent ideas and analyses even when the study itself was not the most rigorous.

And….remember APA format, please. MLA writers may find this a challenge at times.

Any questions you may have are welcome. Please text (504-415-8405) or email (tmmendez@uno.edu).