According to the rubric for this class, an excellent annotated bibliography will demonstrate that you have done a "thorough job of library research" and selected sources that are "immediately relevant" to the author and topic you are researching. Typical library sources include articles from peer reviewed journals, books from established publishers, essays, literary criticism, and other scholarship. The best place to find those are in the following library databases. Each database has a specialist kind of information to find. You may need to use more than one database to get all the information you need.
Best bets for LMC are included in the Literature, Media and Communication resource guide. Browse our entire list of resource guides for other subjects.
A scholarly database organizes the best quality, most relevant information for a field or discipline in one place so it can be searched. Because there is so much scholarly research and so many different fields, databases specialize in which kinds of information or tools they provide.
Scholarly databases take into account the important publications and research methods of a field or discipline. The database helps you make choices about which articles you want to see - by subject, dates of publication, overall topic, and more. Google and Google Scholar, while vast, do no quality control on the content they provide or give you good tools to narrow your focus.
The following databases are good starting points for finding scholarly articles. Use the Advanced Search option to combine keywords.
Many scholarly databases include a thesaurus or subject terms list that will help you find appropriate, useful vocabulary and related keywords. One exception to this is JSTOR, which is a full-text resource. Use a variety of synonyms and related terms for your concept, and be as specific as possible for best results with JSTOR.
Most databases will let you copy-paste or export a formatted citation - look for a Cite button or quotation mark icon, and choose the style that your professor requires. In ENGL and LMC courses, this is usually MLA style.
Find additional databases on our A-Z Databases page. Or search for articles by author, title or topic through Articles+ in the Library Catalog.
There are other specialized databases that we will not cover in class, but which you may find useful for your particular topic. Medical ethics is covered by CINAHL Complete, PubMed, and Philosopher's Index. History of medicine is covered by CINAHL Complete, History of Science, Technology & Medicine, and PubMed.
