Annotated Bibliography: The Legal and Ethical Environment in Public Administration
OVERVIEW
The foundation for sound scholarship is a solid command of the academic literature in your field. A scholar builds this foundation by reading and evaluating one academic source at a time.
Over time, you will read many, many sources. It is vitally important for you to keep a record of what you have read, along with important annotations so that you remember how each source is relevant to your research. These citation records include:
• Basic bibliographic details: Author, Title, Publication Name, Date, Page Numbers.
• A brief summary of the source: What was the key argument? What were its strengths or weaknesses? Was anything in the piece applicable to your future research?
• Tags or Keywords: You should consider how to organize your sources so that you can easily recall sources that are relevant to various research projects you may be managing, and sources that are relevant to different parts of a research project.
This Annotated Bibliography Assignment will introduce you to the process of identifying, recording, and annotating sources for later use. It will also introduce you to a citation management tool called RefWorks that is available to all University of Southern California students
. A link to RefWorks is included in the Assignment Instructions for the Module: Week this assignment is due.
NOTE: If you are already accustomed to using another citation manager, you are not required to use RefWorks, but you are strongly encouraged to do so.
INSTRUCTIONS
For this assignment, you are required to submit an Annotated Bibliography in which you:
• Identify at least ten sources that are relevant to a public policy issue that you may be interested in researching for your dissertation.
o State and briefly describe, in a few sentences, the public policy issue you intend to explore in this assignment.
o Create an entry for each source in RefWorks, or your chosen citation manager.
• Annotate each source with a summary of at least 50 words. (If you use RefWorks, write your annotation for each source in the “Abstract” field of your record for that source.)
o Each annotation should state the central thesis of the source being cited.
o Each annotation should explain how the source’s author(s) support their thesis.
o Each annotation should evaluate the relevance or applicability of the source to your research interest.
Produce an Annotated Bibliography document according to current APA format. (See the USC Writing Center for a sample Annotated Bibliography – a link to this is included in the Resources section for the Module: Week this assignment is due.)
o Ensure that you have a properly formatted Title Page with your name, the course name, the instructor name, and the date of your document.
o Ensure that your citations are properly formatted and alphabetized.
o Ensure that your full annotation of each source is included beneath the source’s citation.