Final Project Analytical Annotated Bibliography

Final Project Analytical Annotated Bibliography: Assignment 2 – Final Project Analytical Annotated Bibliography, due Tuesday, Week 4 — September 13

This assignment is worth 20% of your final grade.

For this step of your final project’s development, you will report the results of your research into a resolution of your paper’s workplace* communication problem topic in an Analytical Annotated Bibliography for three authoritative sources that you plan to use in your project to support your thesis.

Before you begin, review Module 4, “Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: Attribution and Citation,” of the academic integrity tutorials again at https://www.umgc.edu/current-students/learning-resources/academic-integrity/tutorial/index.cfm to refresh your understanding of why scholars document their research with in-text citations and references.

Objective: Your objective is to demonstrate your ability to research and critically analyze information that can support your project’s thesis.

Caution: The three sources you use for this assignment must be different from the three that you wrote about in Assignment 1, your literature review. Focus your research for this step assignment on professional and scholarly business journal research and case studies on possible resolutions to yours or similar workplace communication problems.

(*Remember, if you are not employed or cannot discuss your workplace, you should be using a communication problem from another organizational setting in which you are involved for your final project, such as school, church, or a community group.)

Each entry must include a reference formatted according to American Psychological Association (7^th edition) style rules and an analysis as described below. You should be able to use the material that you develop here in your final project. Before you tackle this exercise, please make sure you have read the Week 4 course materials.

Required Research: You must use at least six authoritative sources in your final project, at least three of which will have to be scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles about communication research studies from the UMGC library’s databases.

For this assignment, you will document the research you must do on possible resolutions of your workplace* communication problem by writing an analytical annotated bibliography about three authoritative sources that you found in the UMGC library and plan to use in your project to support your thesis. Look for three relevant professional and scholarly business research, best practice, and/or case study articles in academic business research journals, general circulation business magazines, and trade magazines for possible solutions to yours or similar workplace communication problems. You can get leads to resources on your research topic right in your email by following the instructions at https://libguides.umgc.edu/c.php?g=1150651 to receive RSS and email alerts when new newspaper, magazine, and scholarly journal articles are made available by the library.

To find appropriate resources, use the UMGC library’s portal to communication studies resources at http://libguides.umgc.edu/comm300 . For help finding academic journal articles, see the UMGC library’s resource, “Locate and Evaluate Scholarly Articles,” at http://sites.umgc.edu/library/libhow/articles.cfm . Two online sources can be among your resources, but their credibility must be verified. See the library’s handout, “Is My Source Credible?,” at http://sites.umgc.edu/library/libhow/credibility.cfm for help.

Although you may review the < Encyclopedia of Communication Theory > in our classroom resources to select and come to understand the communication theory or theories that you want to use in your final project, dictionaries and encyclopedias cannot be included in your Analytical Annotated Bibliography or the references for your final project. A relevant YouTube video may be included as one of the internet sources, provided it has been evaluated for credibility.

Content: Review each resource for answers to as much of the following as possible:

• Describe each source’s author
• Analyze each resource’s purpose and audience
• Summarize each resource’s main arguments and conclusions
• Assess each resource’s information for relevance to the paper’s research question
• Evaluate each resource’s strengths, weaknesses and/or biases
• Explain how each resource’s information will be used in the final research paper

Format: The Analytical Annotated Bibliography must contain the following information:

1. Use an APA-style title page.
2. Repeat the title of your assignment at the top of Page 2.
3. Provide the name of the communication theory you are using in your final project.
4. Provide the thesis you are working with at this point in your project’s development.
5. Create an APA-style reference citation for each resource.
6. Write a paragraph annotation of between 150-200 words (excluding APA-style reference) that answers at least the following questions:
   1. What is the resource about? Summarize its purpose, findings, argument, and/or conclusions.
   2. What is the resource’s greatest strength in relation to your project’s focus? Assess the resource’s strengths, weaknesses, or biases.
   3. What role will the resource play in your project? Evaluate the resource’s relevance to your project.
7. Repeat Nos. 5 and 6 above for each of your three sources.

You will find an example below of an APA-style analytical annotation from the UMGC Library’s “How to Write an Annotated Bibliography” at http://sites.umgc.edu/library/libhow/bibliography_tutorial.cfm . While not possible to accomplish here, the reference and the annotation should be double-spaced in documents formatted in word processing software such as MS Word.

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 attention to the last sentence of this annotation. It provides an example of a critique of an author’s research.

Resources to support this activity:

The following resources should be consulted for guidance on how to analyze, write, and format the annotations and citations.

• “Sample APA-style Analytical Annotated Bibliography,” in the Week 4 learning resources
• “How to Write an Annotated Bibliography” at http://sites.umgc.edu/library/libhow/bibliography_tutorial.cfm
• “Locate and Evaluate Scholarly Articles” at http://sites.umgc.edu/library/libhow/articles.cfm
• “Is My Source Credible?” at http://sites.umgc.edu/library/libhow/credibility.cfm
• “How to Read a Research Study Article in a Scholarly Journal” by UMGC Faculty in the Week 4 learning resources
• Citations and reference formats: UMGC’s guide to the APA’s new seventh edition of its style rules can be found on our library’s Citing and Writing portal at https://sites.umgc.edu/library/libhow/gethelp-citing.cfm
• Citation examples: https://libguides.umgc.edu/apa-examples  

• Sample format for an APA-style student paper at https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/apa_sample_paper.html

• Our library also has videos on how to format an APA-style paper according to the latest APA rules at https://libguides.umgc.edu/apa-document-formatting-7h and on how to create your APA-style references page at https://libguides.umgc.edu/apa-references-list-formatting-7h

Grading: For insight into your instructor’s expectations for this assignment, scroll down here to click on and review its grading rubric. A sample student assignment is attached to this assignment folder.

Due Date: Submit your analytical annotated bibliography as a Word .doc, .docx, or .rtf attachment only in its assignment folder by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday of Week 4. Do not submit the assignment in .pdf, .Gdoc, .Pages, or other document formats. See the Course Schedule in the syllabus or the interactive calendar in this classroom for the exact date that this assignment is due in Week 4.