HIST 2950 Sophomore Seminar in European History: Living in Modern Europe: Writing and Citing

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An annotated bibliography is a list of primary and secondary historical sources surrounding a historical topic. Each entry in the bibliography contains a formal citation of the work, as you would use to cite it when writing a paper, followed by an annotation of perhaps 3-5 sentences which describes and explains the significance of the source to the topic/your understanding of it. Creating an annotated bibliography shows that you have read your sources carefully and have a good sense of how they relate to your topic and to one another.

First Steps

• Identify and gather the sources that you will use.
• Read each source and take some general notes on it.
• Notes will take a different form for primary and secondary sources, and you may list primary sources separately from secondary sources in your annotated bibliography.
• Make sure that you know how to cite sources in your bibliography correctly. A tool like Zbib (ZoteroBib) can help.

Format of the Annotated Bibliography:

• Each source is listed in correct bibliographic form.
• Sources are listed in alphabetical order by the author's last name. Primary sources are often listed in a separate section from secondary sources.
• Each source is followed by a 3-5 sentence annotation.

What to Include in the Annotation (Scholarly sources)

• A sentence or two on the general topic or research question that the work addresses.
• A sentence or two on the thesis or argument of the work.
• A sentence on the author's methodology: What kinds of sources are used? Is it a case study or an overview of scholarship on the subject?
• A sentence on how this source is relevant to your paper topic, or how it makes sense of/adds context to some aspect of your primary source or its author

What to Include in the Annotation (Primary Sources)

• A sentence or two about the source's author (individual or corporate/institutional)
• A sentence or two about the original purpose and/or audience of the source; it may be relevant to mention if the source is part of a larger collection of similar material.
• A sentence summarizing the content and tone of the source.
• A sentence noting information that requires contextualization through secondary sources to understand

Things to Know When Using Generative AI For Writing Tasks:

1. If you upload published papers into a generative AI interface for summarization, you are probably breaking copyright, unless you are doing so within a "walled garden," like the MU-subscribed version of Microsoft Copilot.

2. If you upload material that you intend to publish later, yourself, you risk that material becoming part of a generated "answer" for someone else.

3. Generative AI is very good at language, grammar, and rhetoric, but unreliable when it comes to facts...especially in areas where the free internet is full of bias, uninformed opinions, misinformation or even disinformation. AI has no way to know if it's right or not. 

4. When AI generates "sourced information,"  it may generate sources that do not exist, or data that does not exist in the sources to which the data is attributed. Any sources provided by AI must always be checked, both for actual existence and for whether they contain the information the AI is attributing to them. 

5. Experts can usually identify AI-generated fake sources or misquotes fairly easily, but novices have to spend time checking. It may be better to invest that time into reading and writing, which is a better investment into your own knowledge and research skills.

Any consistent citation format is acceptable, but Dr. Karthas prefers one of these two:

The second link goes to our guide, for more information on Keenious.

The text you provide to Keenious, either typed or uploaded, does not get incorporated into Keenious, so there is no copyright issue and no worry about your writing ending up as another AI user's output.