Proposal, Annotated Bibliography, and Literature Review Course Competencies

For this project you will need to gather peer reviewed articles for your Annotated Bibliography.  A main goal in finding articles is to gather scholarly evidence to support your proposal arguments.

Some prefer to refine their idea first and use it to inform their library search. Others prefer to start in the library databases and let their library search help refine their topic. This process is called the preliminary search.

Preliminary Search Strategy:

1.  Carefully read the assignment to identify research needs.

Here are the main research requirements of the Assessment and Surveillance Plan Project (though there may be others):

Research Elements: Assessment and Surveillance Plan Project

•  Specific health issue: e.g. congestive heart failure, obesity or STDs
•  Identify culture(s) and demographic(s) affected and their specific needs: e.g. poverty, Asian or elderly
•  Policy or policies that influence the health issue: e.g. vaccination requirements, insurance coverage, Older Americans Act

You will want a nice variety of articles to establish your arguments. Relevant articles may touch on all three levels above, two out of the three, or only one element at a time. Therefore, you will need to try different search strategies to perform a thorough search.

2.  Plan your search strategy and identify keywords. Here are some approaches for searching for scholarly articles: 

• Mix and match to try different element combinations: e.g. congestive heart failure and poverty; obesity and (specific cultural group); restrictions and HIV
• Search on a specific condition/problem and scan articles for related policies: e.g. STDs and detection and public health
• Policy or policies that influence the health issue:  e.g. vaccination requirements, insurance coverage, Older Americans Act

You will want a nice variety of articles to establish your arguments. Relevant articles may touch on all three levels above, two out of the three, or only one element at a time. Therefore, you will need to try different search strategies perform a thorough search.

3.  Think about where to find information about policy.

What is a social policy?  This may be the most difficult element to find. Most social policies are not labeled with the word “policy” and they may have any of these qualities:

•  Regional in scope
•  National in scope
•  Formal or have legal roots
•  Informal – rooted in social assumption or smaller institutional regulations

As you brainstorm for search topics, keep an eye out for articles that mention disadvantage or cultural inequalities and their relationships to health disparities. Those will be a clue that indicates a policy/disparity connection.

Check to make sure that your Annotated Bibliography is complete using the checklist below. The more thorough your Annotated Bibliography, the more seamlessly it will transform into your paper’s literature review.

Components of the Annotated Bibliography list:

• Lists citations to books, articles, and documents
• Comprises a variety of credible perspectives
• Formatted in APA Style
• Annotation follows each citation

Annotations should contain some or most of the following:

• Provides the reader with more information about the content of the sources
• Consists of a paragraph that’s both a descriptive and evaluative paragraph (about 150 words)
• Offers both a description and a critical assessment of the articles or books being annotated
• Gives the reader a sense of the quality of the sources
• Gives a sense of the argumentative position of the author relative to others in the field
• Informs the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited
• Concisely exposes the author’s point of view and the clarity of the work
• Evaluates the appropriateness of expression, and authority
• Summarizes the central theme and scope of the book or article
• Evaluates the authority or background of the author
• Comments on the intended audience
• Compares or contrasts this work with another you have cited
• Explains how this work illuminates your bibliography topic

Informing the Literature Review
As you prepared your Annotated Bibliography, common themes should have emerged from the articles. Your articles for your Literature Review will fall into these natural categories. This structure will help organize your use of sources as you synthesize, or pull them together, in writing. (It doesn’t matter how your sources are organized; it only matters that they are organized logically.) Usually, the citations are grouped according to common themes or the stances they share.

As you write the literature review, you will synthesize, or pull together, your analysis and articles that follow similar themes. You don’t need to try to wedge all of the articles from your Annotated Bibliography inside your Literature Review paragraphs. Some sources will be less helpful in the Literature Review section of your paper but extremely helpful if reserved as evidence in other sections.

Through your Annotated Bibliography, you have already performed the evaluation and analysis of the literature. Now, it’s time for the synthesis. Your literature review will synthesize the literature into a summary of what’s known and what’s not known.
Your literature review will also . . .

• Review the background of the problem area – the history of the issue.
• Identify merits of previous studies (who, what, when, where, why, how)
• Explore what the field has said on the topic
• Identify areas of controversy in the literature
• Demonstrate your knowledge of the field
• Define which issues and authors are important to you and which are not
• Define where you stand in the academic conversation of your field
• Formulate questions that need further research/answers

Performing a selective, critical literature review will help you in your professional as well as scholarly life. An evaluation of pertinent works provides good evidence for your arguments. It demonstrates that you’ve done the necessary preliminary research to undertake your project. Many grant proposals even require a literature review.

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