Atbilstības meklējumi starp prasībām un izpildījumu bakalaura darbu anotācijās: Rīgas Tehniskās universitātes piemērs

The aim of the publication is to explore and reveal the correspondence between university guidelines for writing annotations and their implementation in students’ bachelor’s theses. To achieve this, annotations in both Latvian and English from bachelor’s theses written in 2023 and 2024 by students of various faculties and specializations at Riga Technical University (RTU) were used. An annotated text corpus with more than 2000 annotations was created by working in parallel in two groups. A substantial inter-rater agreement was reached indicated by Fleiss’ kappa of 0.80. From this corpus, three samples comprising 64 annotations in Latvian were selected: (1) General Chemistry – 31 annotations, (2) Heat, Gas, and Water Technology – 19 annotations, (3) Environmental Science – 14 annotations. A quantitative approach was used in the study. The performance of the three samples was compared against the respective methodological guidelines of each specialization using 11 defined categories. Six categories were selected for more detailed analysis: motivation, objective, methods, results, conclusions, and keywords. The presence of these categories in the annotation texts was examined in relation to the requirements specified in the guidelines for each specialization. According to the methodological guidelines, five categories were indicated for Group 1, seven for Group 2, and only four for Group 3 out of the possible eleven. The correspondence between the required and the actually included categories was expressed in percentages and visualized in a chart. The results reveal that the correspondence between what is required and what is actually present in the annotations is moderate. Several important categories are frequently omitted from annotations even when specified in the guidelines, while in other cases, they appear despite not being explicitly mentioned in the methodological materials. The categories “keywords” and “results” particularly stand out, showing relatively high correspondence, whereas “objective” and “methods” show low correspondence. This indicates a need to clarify and improve the methodological guidelines. Although none of the samples demonstrated full alignment with the guideline requirements, the influence and significance of the guidelines on the annotation writing process cannot be entirely dismissed, as several categories were fulfilled in more than 50 % of the cases. The article emphasizes that a well-developed annotation serves as a calling card of the research and highlights the necessity for a unified approach and clear content definitions in the guidelines, grounded in theoretical literature and supported by transparent examples.