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Intro to Women and Gender Studies - WGST110 - Pop Culture Representations

Research guide for the Representations of Women and Gender in Pop Culture: Then and Now assignment in Intro to Women and Gender Studies

Annotated bibliography

An annotated bibliography not only summarizes the resource, it also explains how it is relevant to your research.

An annotated bibliography is a list of cited sources with brief explanations centering around one topic or research question. The purpose is to help the reader of the bibliography understand the uses of each source and the relationships of one source to another. It will also help you, the researcher, decide which resources are best for your project. 

Some questions to consider when writing your annotated bibliography:

  • Who is the author(s) and what qualifies them to write this? (AUTHORITY)
  • What was done? A study? A literature review? (METHODS)
  • Why is this a good article for your paper? (USEFULNESS)
  • What is best about this and what isn’t included? (STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES)
  • What are they saying overall? What is the takeaway? (CONCLUSION)
  • Does this support or argue against your topic? (REFLECTION)

More information on annotated bibliographies can be found on the Excelsior OWL website. 

 

Creative Commons License
The above work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

 

Annotated bibliography definition adapted from Susan Archambault's Annotated Bibliography Assignment: Archambault, Susan. "Annotated Bibliography." CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments), 2015. https://www.projectcora.org/assignment/annotated-bibliography.
Bulleted list adapted from Aisha Conner-Gaten's Finding Sources and Annotated Bibliography Fish Bowls lesson plan: Conner-Gaten, Aisha. "Finding Sources and Annotated Bibliography Fish Bowls." CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments), 2017. https://www.projectcora.org/assignment/finding-sources-and-annotated-bibliography-fish-bowls.

Annotated bibliography example

This example uses Chicago Style for the article citation.

Rasmussen, Eric E. and Rebecca L. Densley. "Girl in a Country Song: Gender Roles and Objectification of Women in Popular Country Music Across 1990 to 2014." Sex Roles 76, no. 3-4 (2017): 188-201. doi: http://dx.doi.org.ezp.raritanval.edu/10.1007/s11199-016-0670-6.

This scholarly article, written by faculty at the College of Media & Communication, Texas Tech University, examines how women are portrayed in country music. By analyzing 750 popular country songs, the authors found that songs from the 1990s or 2000s were more likely to show women in empowered roles than songs popular from 2000-2014. It also finds that this is the case with songs sung by men, but not women. This supports my argument that women are objectified or portrayed as inferior in recent country songs. However, this source is lacking current data from the past 7 years. The article contributes to the discussion of negative portrayals of women in popular music.