The annotated bibliography is a way to prepare for writing a research paper. It is essentially a set of notes associated with a source. It helps to identify what sources are available, which are most useful to your paper, and where in your paper they might be useful. It can also be used to store the data that you will use in your paper. It is also a useful way to get your head around a big issue. I don’t believe that there is any wrong way to do this, but there are ways that are more or less useful. You should use an annotation style that is most useful to you. I have always liked to break mine into three parts:

1. A basic summary of the resource (book, journal, legal code, etc). The summary generally tells what kind of information is contained in the source, and perhaps what the main point of author is.
2. A set of notes on the source. Here I generally take notes on the article, book, etc. I go by page number, but often highlight things that I think will be very useful later. It is very important to accurately associate the data that you collect from the source with a page number. These notes generally serve as the data for whatever paper I am writing.
3. My ideas. Here I might include a note on whether this resource is useful to me, and where I might want to use it in my paper. If some important idea occurs to me as I am reading I will note it down as well. For example, maybe in reading a particular article I realized an important connection between two sets of data. Also, I might note down questions that occur to me.