Annotations in Computer Science

CS63: Principles of Computer Organization
Fall Semester, 1997

Ray Ontko
Department of Computer Science
Earlham College

Your research project should include an annotated list of sources. This page shows a recommended way of citing web and non-web sources on an HTML page, and lists some things to consider when writing annotations.

There are two key issues to keep in mind when preparing an annotated bibliography:

be clear about your purpose when evaluating a source for inclusion and writing your annotation, and
provide a complete and accurate citation so that they too can find your source.

Citing Sources

Each discipline cites sources differently. [Why might this be true? Why might this be appropriate?] In computer science, here are a few examples:

Books

Tanenbaum, A.S.: Structured Computer Organization, Third Edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990.

Papers presented at conferences

Li, K.: "IVY: A Shared Virtual Memory System for Parallel Computing," Proc. 1988 Int'l Conf. on Parallel Proc. (Vol. II), IEEE, pp. 94-101, 1988.
Gelernter, D., and Carriero, N.: "Applications Experience with Linda," Proc. PPEALS Conf., ACM, pp. 173-187, 1988.

Journal articles

Carriero, N., and Gelernter, D.: "Linda in Context," Commun. ACM, vol. 32, pp. 444-458, April 1989.
Bal, H.E., Stiener, J.G., and Tanenbaum, A.S.: "Programming Languages for Distributed Systems," Computing Surveys, 1989.

Web Sources

No clear standard has emerged for citing web sources. At the very least, you should include the name of the author, the name of the page (or top page), and its URL.

Ontko, R.: "Annotations in Computer Science", http://www.ontko.com/~rayo/annotation.html.

In a web-based list of sources, the URL should be a link to the document. We list the URL so that printed versions of the web page preserve the URL information.

Annotating Sources

A collection of sources may be annotated for any number of reasons. In our case, we annotate for two reasons:

to provide others a brief description of the source which allows them to quickly evaluate whether (and why or why not) it might be worth the trouble to find and read the source.
to provide a brief description which reminds us of the source, if we've read it.

The annotation should serve as a reminder for you (should you need to look back to a source), and as a blazed trail for others, helping them decide which texts might be useful for which purposes.

For our purposes, use the following guidelines when writing your annotations:

Two or three sentences abstracting the topic, scope of coverage, depth of coverage of the source. If the source presents research results, summarize the significant purpose and conclusions of the piece.
One sentence to identify what group of people would find this source useful (e.g. layperson, undergraduate students, etc.)
One sentence to indiciate why and how this source was useful for you and your topic.
An indication of the amount or kind of material. For print sources it should be the number of pages. For web sources, it might be the number of Kbytes in the document.

Note that what may appear to be a good source for your purposes, may be a bad one for someone else's, and vice-versa. In other words, how "good" a source is depends on what the reader is looking for.