In project 2 you will prepare an annotated bibliography on the topic of your choosing.An annotated bibliography is the first step along the road of writing a review article. It will list all of the articles that you have read related to the topic, as well as articles you have yet to read. It should include full citation information, as well as brief notes to remind you of the key points of the article.
Your annotated bibliography should include detailed comments on at least 8 articles per person, and list other papers to read in the future. The point of these comments is to help trigger your memory when you are writing the full review paper (project 3), and they should be about two paragraphs long. They don't need to be full sentences, the important thing is to get the main ideas down. Focus on what is relevant for your topic - this may only be a small subset of the full paper. You should also add any interesting references to your annotated bibliography for future reading.
To find eight papers relevant to your topic, you may need to look at 10-20 articles. Learn to read the title, the abstract, and then to skim the article. Since all topics will be visualisation related, just looking at the figures is a quick way to figure out if the paper is relevant.
There are two basic ways to find possibly relevant papers: searching and following citation trails back and forward in time:
Your bibliography should be created in bibtex because this is the standard bibliographic format used in statistics. You can edit it by hand, but it's usually easier to use an editor. For a friendly editor on the mac, try bibdesk, and on windows jabref. If you use firefox, you might want to try zotero. Another option is Mendeley.
To produce a nice paper copy of your bibliography, download and run the example files below:
bibliography.tex: tex template fileboxplots.bib: my sample annotated bibliography. Yours should contain many more references, and much more detail about each one.plain-annote.bst: bibtex style file from Stephen C. Billups