Students sometimes submit a well-written annotated bibliography when a literature review was assigned, or the reverse. Both are legitimate document types; the confusion comes from not understanding what each one is actually meant to demonstrate.
An annotated bibliography evaluates sources individually
Each entry stands alone: a citation followed by a summary, an assessment of the source’s argument or methodology, and a note on its relevance to your project. The organizing unit is the single source. There is no requirement that entries build an argument together — the document’s job is showing you can evaluate sources critically, one at a time.
A literature review evaluates the field as a whole
A literature review’s organizing unit is the idea or theme, not the individual source. Sources are grouped, compared, and synthesized to build a cumulative argument about what the field currently understands, disputes, or hasn’t examined. A literature review that reads as a series of disconnected source summaries — even well-written ones — has actually drifted into annotated-bibliography structure without noticing.
A fast way to tell which one you’ve written
Read only the first sentence of each paragraph. In an annotated bibliography, each first sentence introduces a different source. In a literature review, each first sentence should advance an idea — and a reader should be able to follow your argument from just those sentences alone, without the supporting detail.
Why the distinction matters beyond grading
An annotated bibliography is often the working document that precedes a literature review — the individual evaluation stage before the synthesis stage. Treating them as the same task skips the synthesis work a literature review actually requires, and a reader notices the gap even when every individual source summary is accurate.
Choose the output before generating prose
Decide whether the next document must evaluate individual sources or make a field-level argument, then prepare notes in that form. A drafting tool can help create a provisional annotated entry or thematic paragraph from the same selected studies; Craft is most useful after that decision has been made, when its output can be judged against a clear assignment purpose.