Assignment:
For this assignment, your task is to generate an intelligence research question and produce a literature review and annotated bibliography. Select an intelligence topic of your choice that calls for either an explanatory study (why question) or predictive study (what will happen question). Once you have developed your research question, you will conduct a literature review and produce an annotated bibliography.
General Requirements
1. Document Format.
a. MS Word document
b. One-inch (1") margins
c. Times New Roman font
d. Twelve (12) pitch
e. Not including your title page, this assignment should be 4 pages. This does include your annotated bibliography.
f. Double space, except for your bibliography's citations (see example below).
2. Citation Format: The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). As stated in the Academic Integrity Briefings, information taken directly from another source must be placed in quotations and cited following the CMS format contained in the week one "lessons" folder. You must cite all other information from your sources, even if you do not quote directly. DIRECT QUOTING SHOULD BE KEPT TO A MINIMUM.
Section I: Introduction
In your introduction, you will give the background of your research topic. What is the broader intelligence issue? Why should you reader care about this topic? What are the implications for US national security? Your specific research question will be an element of this larger problem.
*Note: An intelligence issue is NOT the evaluation of US policy or process. An intelligence issue is something that the IC researches to understand an adversary. For example, will North Korea invade South Korea or will Iran develop a nuclear weapons capability.
Section II: The Research Question
In this section, you should address your specific research question. This section should include:
a) Your research question
b) What type of study is this (explanatory or predictive)?
c) What is the dependent variable (refer to your week 1 reading)?
d) What are the independent variables (refer to your week 1 reading)?
e) Are there obvious answers to your specific research question? What are they?
f) Short discussion of how you developed this question and why it should be of interest to the Intelligence Community.
Section III: Related Literature
Provide current state of our accumulated knowledge as it relates to your specific research question. This section should answer whether or not there is an accumulated body of scholarship on this issue. Is this a new issue or have scholars and analysts been studying it for years?
What kind of literature is out there? Are there leading researchers/analysts on this topic? Who are they? If this is a new issue, what challenges will that present to your research?
Section IV: Annotated Bibliography.
While conducting your literature review, you will also build an annotated bibliography. Do this by providing an annotated bibliography of at least five sources you would use to answer your research question. These sources should include books, journals and other scholarly articles. In the annotation include what information the source provides to your research question. Use the Chicago style of annotation for this and all assignments in this course. Formatting counts.
An annotated bibliography is a list of sources on a certain topic with a brief description of each source. Each entry in an annotated bibliography should include all the information normally included in a list of works cited. For instance, the citation for a book would include the title, author, publisher, place of publication, and year of publication.
The bibliographic information is followed by an annotation, which can be a few sentences or a lengthy paragraph that describes the contents of the source and provides a brief explanation of its relevance to your research. For this assignment, your annotations should be a minimum of 5 sentences.