Annotated References (Referenced Copy)

Updated 2026-07-13 · markdown version

Annotated references (US) or referenced copy (UK) is promotional material marked so that every claim carries a human-readable pointer to the exact substantiating passage in its source — conventionally source/page/column/paragraph/lines, e.g. Pasieka 2020/pg3/col1/para2/lines2–6. The annotation exists so reviewers and vault operators can verify each claim in seconds rather than hunting through a paper.

The locator grammar is human-visual by design: page, column, paragraph, and line counts refer to the printed page as a reader sees it. Figures and tables are cited by the document's own labels (Fig. 1, Table 3); unpublished sources (protocols, CSRs) use document title plus version, with named sections standing in where columns don't exist. Derived numbers often carry their arithmetic in the annotation, because reviewers check math that isn't shown.

Annotation has historically been manual, late-stage drudgery — and naive automation has repeatedly failed because text extraction doesn't see what humans see (columns, printed line breaks). The durable pattern is annotation as a byproduct of evidence-linked writing: the claim is linked to its passage when written, and the locator generates from that link. See Claim Annotation & Reference Discovery, Explained for the full treatment.