Best practices for research papers, theses, and dissertations: structure, citation accuracy, tone, and revision habits that survive peer review.
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An annotated bibliography and a literature review can be built from the same five sources and still do completely different jobs: one evaluates each source on its own, the other builds an argument out of all of them at once. Here is what changes, source by source, when the same reading list moves from one document into the other.
Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion: four sections, four different questions. Most structural mistakes are really one section answering another section's question, especially where interpretation, a stray result, or a literature review lands in the wrong place.
A reference to a source that does not exist is not a formatting problem. It is fabrication, and journals now check for it before a paper ever reaches print. Here is how a fake citation gets into a manuscript, what an editor does when a DOI will not resolve, the process the Committee on Publication Ethics sets out, and what actually happens to the paper afterward, from a quiet correction to a public retraction.
A citation and a permission slip answer different questions. One documents where a paragraph came from; the other says whether you were allowed to generate it in the first place. Here is what a marker actually concludes when a reference list names a tool the assignment brief forbids.
APA applies sentence case to article and chapter titles but title case, italicized, to journal and periodical names, and mixing the two up is the single most common capitalization mistake in a reference list. Here is the rule, MLA's different version of it, and the same reference formatted both ways.
Most advice says cut every passive sentence from a methods section. In practice, most of a methods section is exactly where passive voice belongs. Here is the test that tells the two apart, the same procedure written both ways, and what APA's own guidance actually recommends.