Choose 18-22 useful peer-reviewed articles (you are also welcome to use books from university presses) to serve as the foundation for your annotated bibliography and eventual lit review.

You will want to be sure that your selections include 3 kinds of pieces:

• Field defining pieces: These are the articles and books that virtually everyone researching this topic cites. The citation account is helpful here, but it is just one piece of info. You’ll know you have a FDP when the other pieces that you read on your topic cite this piece.
• The most recent research: Include the most current developments generated by your searches. Pieces published in 2022 and 2023 won’t have many cites yet, but they may have new information. To determine which new pieces are apt to be good quality, the author(s) and the journal quality are often useful context.
• The most central research to your unique question (in terms of topic). A fair amount of the research you include may be about adjacent or parallel cases / topics, but you will also want to choose the piece(s) that are closest to what you are exploring, even if they are cited less often or are a bit dated.

Your selections should also:

• Come primarily from Sociology and/or Communications journals (e.g., Information, Communication, and Society; Social Media & Society; Media, Culture & Society; New Media & Society; Sociological Quarterly; Social Problems; Journal of Communication, etc.). A minority of them can also come from related fields (e.g., Cultural Studies, Computer Science, Psychology, Political Science). For books, use the author(s) credentials to decide determine the book’s field.
• Be primarily empirical. You are welcome to include up to 5 theoretical pieces in your final bibliography and paper, but the majority of the research should involve analysis of data (interviews, field notes, surveys data, experiments, content analysis, etc.)

Your annotations should include:

• Times the article has been cited (as per google scholar)
• The research question or puzzle (v. brief)
• Data used (survey, interviews, content analysis, etc.) (v. brief)
• Primary argument (if theory paper) OR Primary finding and argument (if empirical)
• As needed: Any pieces of research (scholarly or otherwise) referenced in this article that you want to check out. Often the best 1-3 articles you find in an initial search are a treasure map; They guide you to research that is more helpful your original “hits,” and then those new additions yield additional leads.

Your future self will appreciate it if you also leave yourself a place for miscellaneous notes – if there is a particularly useful concept you want to remember, a question/concern about the research, a quote your found meaningful. But for these to be useful, they should be brief (think 1-5 lines, not an entire page).