Final Research Paper Annotated Bibliography

Your final research paper will need to reflect careful research on your topic. For this assignment, you will find three relevant, credible, current, and authoritative sources that you can use in your final research paper in support of your thesis or position statement on your research question. These must not be the same resources you used for your mass communication theory literature review. Focus on the media effects issue(s) of your research question.

You will summarize these resources to create an analytical annotated bibliography according to the guidelines explained in this video tutorial from the university’s library.

An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and other resources used for some research purpose. Each entry includes a citation that provides publication information on a source, followed by a brief descriptive and evaluative paragraph or annotation that describes the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the source.

Find three sources of relevant, credible, current, and authoritative sources of information that you can use in your final research paper to support your thesis or position paper. Review this resource from the Effective Writing Center to learn how to evaluate the authority and credibility of sources you think may be appropriate for your final research paper.

Then, write a 2-3-page annotated bibliography that begins by stating your final research paper’s purpose and its refined thesis or position statement.

In another 2-3 sentences, explain how your research process is going. You should start this explanation by specifically stating, “My research process is …” or “My research progress has been …”

Once you have summarized your final project’s purpose, refined thesis or position statement, and the progress you have made toward completing the paper, you must present your annotated bibliography for the three sources.

For each resource:

Start the annotation with a complete reference citation according to these style rules from the American Psychological Association. See this APA Examples page in our library’s resources for information on how to write a reference citation in APA style.
Directly beneath citation, write an annotation of at least 200 words that:
Describes the purpose of the work
Summarizes the resource’s content, including its main arguments and conclusions
Describes the type of audience for which the work was written
Describes its author(s)
Evaluates and explains how the information’s relevance to your research question
Describes any special or unique features about the material
Evaluates and explains the information’s strengths, weaknesses or biases
Explains how you will use its information in your research paper
For example:

Breeding evil. (2005, August 6). Economist, 376(8438), 9. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com

This editorial from the Economist describes the controversy surrounding video games and the effect they have on people who use them. The article points out that most critics of gaming are people over 40 and it is an issue of age not of the games themselves. While the author briefly mentions studies done around the issue of violence and gaming, he does not go into enough depth for the reader to truly know the range of studies that have actually been done in this area, other than to take his word that the research is unsatisfactory. The author of this article stresses the age factor over violence as the real reason for opposition to video games and stresses the good gaming has done in most areas of human life. This article is a good resource for those wanting to begin to explore the controversy surrounding video games, however for anyone doing serious research, one should actually examine some of the research studies that have been done in this area rather than simply take the author’s word that opposition to video games is simply due to an issue of generational divide.

Please pay particular attention to the last sentence in the above annotation. It criticizes the author’s research.

Arrange your three citations alphabetically with their annotations.

Preferred language style Simple (Easy vocabulary, simple grammar constructions