Annotated Bibliography

The assignment has two primary purposes: (1) to acquaint you with how to find specific scientific materials in the holdings of a good library; and (2) to give you the opportunity to do some in-depth reading in a topical area of your choice. You are being asked to accomplish these goals through creation of an annotated bibliography, which requires you to read scientific papers in detail and to summarize their contents in your own words,

Your bibliography should cover at least 10 scientific papers and it should treat some of the historical development of your topic. Each student responsible for his/her annotated bibliography, even if students work together on the research paper.

An annotation, unlike an abstract, does not necessarily follow the organization of the original document it summarizes. Another characteristic that sets annotations apart from abstracts is an element of interpretation or evaluation. Annotations may also contain shorthand notes linking the paper to other, related works. The annotations you prepare for this class will be of an extended form, and each should include the following information:

a) a complete bibliographic citation;?b) a statement describing the research problem the article addresses; c) any hypotheses set forth by the paper's author(s);?d) the methods used to address the problem;?e) the conclusions reached in the article; f) your evaluation of the article.

Because annotated bibliographies can be extremely useful for preparing papers some time down the road, it is critical that you use your own words. Any direct quotations (which are quite permissible) should be set out in quote marks. Don't base your annotations on authors' or others' abstracts; they should be the result of you having read each paper in its entirety. An example of an extended annotation is appended. Collections of annotations can be extremely useful for preparing the literature-review sections of research papers; if you take this approach, record your annotations in text files for convenient use in the future. Alternatively, most bibliography- management programs (for example, EndNote) have a field devoted to "comments" or "notes." You may want to cross-reference ideas between articles in the various entries using "see also . . ." notation.

EXAMPLE ANNOTATION

Speight, J.G. (1971). Log-normality of slope distributions. Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie 15: 290-301.

Various authors have examined the frequency distributions of slopes by defining classes and ascertaining the percentage of the total land area that falls in each class. When a large proportion of the landscape is in low-angle slopes, positive skew results in the frequency curve or histogram describing the distribution. Use of the normal curve has, therefore, not been appropriate with these distributions. This paper suggests that when the logarithm of the tangent of slope angles is plotted as a cumulative frequency curve on normal probability paper, the data approximate a normal distribution very well. The slope data of five earlier authors were transformed in this manner, as were new data from two areas investigated by the author. The actual class frequency was expressed as a ratio to the class frequency of the normal distribution, plotted on semi-log paper, and the resultant curves were examined for evidence of characteristic slope angles. The author concluded that the logtan normal distribution of slopes is frequently found in nature, and that two parameters, the mean and the standard deviation, may be used to compare slope distributions, both within and between landscape units. Large standard deviations are indicative of dissimilar processes at work in various parts of a landscape and are therefore reflections of a heterogeneous landform assemblage. This paper provides a useful extension to Strahler's work in the 1950s on the frequency distribution of slope angles. It also serves to integrate several earlier studies by treating various data sets in a standardized fashion. On the negative side, it shares a shortcoming of many morphometric studies by failing to relate the statistical distributions to physical processes. The logtan transformation, in particular, does not have an easily decipherable interpretation.

Papers need annotated bibliography

T. D. Clayton. "Beach Replenishment Activities on U.S. Continental Pacific Coast." Journal of Coastal Research 7, no. 4 (1991): 1195-210.
Hapke, Cheryl J., Dave Reid, and Bruce Richmond. "Rates and Trends of Coastal Change in California and the Regional Behavior of the Beach and Cliff System." Journal of Coastal Research 25, no. 3 (2009): 603-15.

Dugan, Jenifer E., and David M. Hubbard. "Loss of Coastal Strand Habitat in Southern California: The Role of Beach Grooming." Estuaries and Coasts 33, no. 1 (2010): 67-77.

Zalesny, Emil R. "Foraminiferal Ecology of Santa Monica Bay, California." Micropaleontology 5, no. 1 (1959): 101-26.

Donn S. Gorsline. "Depositional events in Santa Monica Basin, California Borderland, over the past five centuries" Sedimentary GeologyVolume 104, Issues 1-4, July 1996, Pages 73-88.

Sandrine Aubié, and Jean-Pierre Tastet. "Coastal Erosion, Processes and Rates: An Historical Study of the Gironde Coastline, Southwestern France." Journal of Coastal Research 16, no. 3 (2000): 756-67.

Ferreira, Ó., P. Ciavola, C. Armaroli, Y. Balouin, J. Benavente, L. Del Río, M. Deserti, L.S. Esteves, K. Furmanczyk, P. Haerens, A. Matias, L. Perini, R. Taborda, P. Terefenko, E. Trifonova, K. Trouw, N. Valchev, A. Van Dongeren, M. Van Koningsveld, and J.J. Williams. "Coastal Storm Risk Assessment in Europe: Examples from 9 Study Sites." Journal of Coastal Research, 2009, 1632-636.

Ellis, Jean T., and Bradley J. Dean. "Gulf of Mexico Processes." Journal of Coastal Research, 2012, 6-13.

Fischer, David W., and Ma. Concepción Arredondo. "Municipal Coastal Hazard Planning: Los Angeles and Orange County City Responses, California." Journal of Coastal Research 15, no. 4 (1999): 974-84.

Lee, Arthur C., and Robert H. Osborne. "Quartz Grain-Shape of Southern California Beaches." Journal of Coastal Research 11, no. 4 (1995): 1336-345.