Ann Bib

How and Why to Make an Annotated Bibliography:

WHY to make an annotated bibliography:

After choosing an area in which you are interested, you need to look over the literature in that area, to see what has already been done.

RESEARCH is like a CONVERSATION. Scholars are talking about a given issue (for example Poverty in Pakistan). When you do research you join this conversation. There are many rules that you must follow when you join the conversation:

1. You must know what people have been talking about -- you have to listen first, then you can say something.

2. You must be polite. You cannot say that everything that is being said here is wrong, or so and so is an idiot, for example.

3. You must carry on in the line of the conversation. You cannot say that this is boring, let us change to topic to something else.

In order to participate in the conversation, the first step is to learn what the conversation has been about. This requires reading the literature on the topic. A good way to get familiar with the relevant literature is to prepare an annotated bibliography. Read articles and prepare notes on each article you read. A list of the articles you have read and a note on what it contains is called an annotated bibliography. This is useful because when we read a lot of articles, we forget what each one contained, and the bibligraphy serves as a useful reminder.

HOW TO Make an Annotated Bibliography:

Put words which describe your topic into search engines. The best one is Google Scholar, but there are others which you might try also, like SSRN and REPEC. For example, I put the terms == Poverty in Pakistan == into Google Scholar, and here is the FIRST PAGE of the output produced:

FM Mirza - journals.ut.ac.ir

Iranian Economic Review, Vol.10, No.12, Winter 2005 Poverty in Pakistan Faisal Mehmood

Mirza* Abstract The pa er in the study of poverty in Pakistan is aimed at the analysis o macroeconomic

determinants of poverty. It reviews the empirical literature on poverty in Pakistan over the

SM Naseem - Pakistan Development Review, 1973

Cited by 61 - Related articles [CITATION]

Mass poverty in Pakistan: A further study

T Alauddin - The Pakistan Development Review, 1975

Cited by 47 - Related articles

The issue of the effects of growth on inequality and poverty is an intriguing one to pose in the

context of a developing country. Pakistan's growth record has been impressive over a

relatively long period. The economy has grown at around six percent per annum in real ...

Cited by 29 - Related articles - All 4 versions

A number of studies have been undertaken during the last three decades to assess the

extent and nature of poverty in Pakistan. These studies are primarily based on data

generated by the Household Income and Expenditure Surveys (HIES), the earliest relating ...

Cited by 29 - Related articles - View as HTML - All 16 versions

SMY Jafri… - Pakistan economic and social review, 1995

Cited by 21 - Related articles

Now, one can cheat, and create an annotated bibliography in a few minutes as follows. Just take the title and abstract for each article and cut and paste them into a sequential listing. This would defeat the purpose of the annotated bibliography, which is to learn about what has been written, AND especially, to identify the GAPS in the literature. These are the open questions, which have not been addressed earlier. Here are some points to keep in mind while preparing an annotated bibliography:

• 1. Read SURVEYS FIRST. Surveys provide a review of the literature, and summarize a lot of findings, so that they substitute for reading a lot of articles. For instance, the first article states that: " It reviews the empirical literature on poverty in Pakistan " this means that nearly all (or most) of the literature on empirical findings will be reviewed here. So reading this one article will provide information on a lot of articles.

  2. Read MOST RECENT LITERATURE first. If the author has done a good job on his literature review, then you will learn about the most recent findings and the open problems in the field. Quite often, authors of recent articles will write down what has been achieved and what needs to done, which will point the way towards good topics for research.

  3. Read recent THESES (MS or Ph.D.) on close or nearby topics. Again, Thesis writers are supposed to provide a review of the field, and if they have done a good job, you can learn a lot from reading their literature review. Note that our IIIE Website contains the MS and Ph.D. theses done at IIIE, and these theses can be obtained from Tauqir if they have not yet been uploaded (as they will be eventually). Also note that searching other search engines, like Google itself, or http://scholar.google.com.pk/ . SSRN or REPEC will generate different lists of articles for the same keyword, so it is worth trying these engines. Also different keywords could be used.

  4. BACKWARDS SEARCH: This means to look at the BIBLIOGRAPHY of the article/s you are reading. This gives the literature previous to the article. If one article is cited by a lot of papers, it might be worth reading it in the original, instead of just learning about it from other articles which say a little bit about it. Basically, backwards search covers previous articles and research which lead up to the article you are readinng.

  5. FORWARDS SEARCH. What has happened SINCE the article was written? Have their been any advances, breakthroughs, changes in thinking, etc.? Previously it used to be not so easy. Now it has become very easy. At the bottom of the listing for an article, there is an entry: CITED BY 21. If you click on this entry, it will take you to a list of articles which have cited this article. That is, these are articles which were published LATER and which put this article in their bibliography. This means that they talked about this article. Any new developments in the field will refer to older articles, even if they say that the earlier article is all wrong.

  6. RELATED ARTICLES: This is a new feature, which Google uses certain techniques to identify related articles, which may also be of interest.

  7. Note that a complete annotated bibliography should always contain most recent articles. If the bibliography for an article or thesis only contains articles written upto 2000, this means that the person who is writing the thesis does not know what has happened in this field in the past ten years. If nobody has written anything on this topic in the past ten years, there is something wrong with this topic (usually).

  8. DOWNLOADING the articles. Our library has JSTOR access so many of the articles can be downloaded from the library. Ask about access. Apparently HEC library has access to a more extensive connection of journals. Anyone with a student ID can enter the HEC library and download articles. If neither of these gives you access, then you can try REPEC or SSRN -- these often have drafts of articles, which may not be the same as the published one, but will be freely downloadable and almost the same. You can also find out the authors personal website, and also that of the INSTITUTION or UNIVERSITY to which the author belongs. These sometimes have a copy of the article. It is also possible to get the email of the author and send them an email. A polite request with a small introduction will often get results, and the author will send you a copy of the article. If all fails, you can talk to me -- I have many students and colleagues overseas and if I ask them to send me an article, they have access to vast library resources and they can usually get them for me.

One of the main points of an annotated bibliography is to IDENTIFY THE GAPS in the literature. What are the issues which have not been researched already? Quite often the open questions in the field will be discussed in the literature by various authors. For example, Camerer in his book on Behavioral Economics explains that there have been too many experiments on the Ultimatum Game and no more are needed, instead one should work on such and such. In the last chapter of his book he mention TEN most important open questions on which there has been very little research.

An annotated bibliography is just a list of articles, together with a description of what the article contains. This annotated bibliography is ONLY meant for personal use of the student to remind him of what all the studies that he is reading contains. In Annotated Bibliography one has to adress these questions;

1. REAL WORLD ISSUE: What question about real world problems or issues is under discussion in the article? EXAMPLE: Why do people use Islamic Banks? Note this is a very big and general question

2. RESEARCH QUESTION: The article itself will have a central question which it seeks to answer. What is the question that article seeks to answer? This may be an artificial or theoretical question. EXAMPLE: Now we specialize to issues discussed in the literature: For example, Are people motivated by profits, or by religious motives, or by some other ideas? So we examine whether the interest rate paid by banks in comparison to profit shares paid by Islamic banks has an effect on deposits in Islamic Banks. Note that the real world questions is made concrete specific and related to existing literature on the issue.

3.METHODOLOGY: How does the author propose to answer the question? For example, we could look at data on profit shares and interest rates and Deposits in Islamic Banks and run regressions. Or we could conduct surveys asking depositors for reasons for using Islamic banks. Other methods are possible.

4. DATA: What kind of data is used to answer the RESEARCH QUESTION? This could be statistical data on bank deposits, or data from surveys. It can also be informal and qualitative information. Some real world information MUST be there to answer a question, even if there is no formal data analysis.

5. TECHNIQUE: Note whether or not special techniques such as regression, logit, DEA, Stochastic Frontier, Instrumental Variables, ARCH/GARCH, etc. etc. are used or needed. More importantly, even if author HAS NOT used any technique, discuss whether or not some new type of regression or data analysis COULD POTENTIALLY be used to answer the questions.

6.CONCLUSION: What is the answer to the research question that the researcher finds as a result of his effort. If possible, relate this to the real world issue addressed in A. For example, if deposits are not sensitive to bank interest, then one could conclude that people are motivated by religious sentiment to put deposits in Islamic banks and do not care about making money.

7. IMPLICATION: What is the implication of this answer about the real world problem, and how can it be solved.

8: CRITICAL ANALYSIS: look for some more evidence on how to support or disconfirm the findings.

EVERY DAY you should be reading a paper or two related to your topic. IDEAS for research do NOT come from sleeping and dreaming and waiting for the professor to tell you what to do.

When a large number of readings are done, then we tend to forget what each article contains and our notes serve as a reminder. An ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY is not part of a research proposal or a thesis [ALTHOUGH many many students, as well as some faculty, do not understand this, so we can easily find accepted theses which have annotated bibliographies instead of a literature review.

Literature Review:

A literature review is not a sequential list of articles. It is organized by concepts, themes, ideas. Below we give a brief discussion with examples, just to show how it is VERY different from an annotated bibliography. Actually the literature review for a proposal is DIFFERENT from the final literature review for the MS Thesis. Here is a link to an introduction to the basics of writing a lit review for a proposal .

How can we organize a list of articles on Poverty in Pakistan, for which we created an annotated bibliography above? There are several ways, and lit review can be organized in several ways.

METHOD 1: Organize by findings. for example:

Most authors agree that poverty decreased in the 1980's and increased in the 90's. A graphical picture of poverty is as follows:

The following authors agree to this assessment. However, XYZ disagrees and argues that poverty remained stable in th 90's. Our research will explore the reasons for this difference and try to decide which party is right.

METHOD 2: Organize by criterion:

The following authors have used the income definition of poverty. On the basis of the Word Bank criterion of dollar-a-day, they have such and such findings.

Other authors use a caloric intake based measure. These are so and so, and they have such and such findings. On the whole the two sets of findings are in broad agreement in the 1980's where income-based poverty and calorie based poverty shows the same trends. However we find the situation different in 200's when, because food prices skyrocketed, income based measures show decreasing poverty, but calorie based authors find increasing poverty.

METHOD 3: Organize by methodology, data set, technique

Regression based poverty has been used by so and so getting such and such result based on HIES data sets

Survey data was used by so and so and such and such

New techniques like Foster-Greer-Thorbeck measure have been used by so and so. Our research we plan to reconcile the differences in the findings of these authors.

You can use more than one way to organize the readings in the annotated bibliography. How you organize the readings will depend on exactly what YOU propose to do in your research. For example, my student Taseer was doing her thesis on multidimensional poverty. This means looking at things like health, education, housing, access to water, etc. [instead of just income or calories]. So it would be useful to look at which of these dimensions have been considered as poverty indicators. One could write for example: HEALTH -- who has written on health before and how (or whether or not) they have correlated it with poverty. EDUCATION -- is there any literature on education and how it relates to poverty? Housing -- have any of the poverty studies taken into account the type of housing as a poverty indicator; FOOD -- here the calorie intake measures and how they correlate with poverty will be available.. So this is another way to organize the poverty readings.

The following example of a Lit Review is taken from Munazza Jabeen proposal:

THEME: The exchange rates returns and volatility is affected by several domestic macroeconomics variables.

There occurs a positive relationship of domestic money supply and exchange rate. The positive relationship is also supported by Morana (2009), but he finds also a negative relationship in one country of his sample. Calderon (2004) finds that higher money supply volatility leads to higher exchange rate volatility.

There exist a positive relationship between domestic output and exchange rates. According to Friedman’s (1953) perspective, exchange rate instability may be an indicator of macroeconomic instability concluded that there is a positive relationship between exchange rate volatility and macroeconomic volatility. Kendal (2004) further reported that depreciation of the currency leads to increase in real output.

There occurs a positive relationship of domestic inflation and exchange rate. Trovask (2008), Ito & Sato (2006), have concluded that exchange rate fluctuation and changes in inflation are interrelated. Conway, Drew, Ben haunt and Alasdair (1998) concluded that changes in exchange rate causes more changes in inflation rate. Sadeghi, Samson & Sherafat (2007) concluded that positive relationship between exchange rate fluctuations and inflation.

Note how each paragraph is organized around an IDEA, and cites all readings in favor of or against the IDEA. This is the principle of the literature review.