Annotation
In Short
An annotation is a reviewer's observation attached to a specific place in a document. Anchoring the comment to the text is what turns a general opinion about quality into a finding an author can act on and a scorecard can cite.
Documentation / QueryTek Review glossary / Annotation
Definition
The anchor is the point. "The eligibility section is unclear" tells an author roughly where to look; an annotation attached to the sentence, naming what is unclear, tells them what to change. The difference determines whether review output is actionable.
A useful annotation carries four things.
Location — the specific passage, precise enough to survive minor edits elsewhere in the document.
Observation — what the reviewer noticed, stated in terms of the rubric dimension it relates to rather than as unattributed preference.
Attribution — who made it and when, so findings can be discussed with the person who made them.
Disposition — what happened next: accepted and revised, declined with reasoning, or escalated. An annotation with no disposition leaves the question of whether it was addressed unanswerable.
Annotations are the evidence layer beneath the scorecard. A dimension marked down should point to the annotations that justify it, which is what allows a specific disagreement rather than a general one.
Two practical properties matter. Annotations must survive revision: if reanchoring fails after an edit, findings detach from the text and the review record degrades into a list of unlocated comments. And they are durable record, not conversation — written to be read by someone reconstructing the review later, which argues for stating the issue rather than debating it inline.
Annotation volume is a weak quality signal on its own. A document with many annotations may be poor, or thoroughly reviewed, or both; volume without dimensions attached does not distinguish these.
Why It Matters
Review output that authors cannot act on wastes the review. Anchored, specific findings are the difference between a document that improves and one that gets re-reviewed with the same result.
Annotations are also what make an outcome auditable. They are the contemporaneous record of what the reviewer saw, which is precisely what someone questioning a decision later needs.
How QueryTek Uses It
QueryTek Review records reviewer findings as annotations anchored to the material and attributable to the reviewer, forming the evidence behind scorecard outcomes. Annotation storage and anchoring mechanics are not published.