Review submissions

Compare annotators' answers side by side, approve or send items back for changes, and follow the back-and-forth in comment threads

This walks through the reviewer’s side of a review-gated queue: reading what came in, approving or sending it back, and clearing a stack in bulk.

Support quality review, the queue from Create a queue, requires reviewer approval. That changes what happens once an item collects its Response quality submissions: instead of finishing on its own, a fully annotated item lands in pending review, and the button its annotators see reads Submit for Review rather than Submit & Next (covered in Annotate items).

Get into review mode

Reviewer approval is itself a gated feature: an org needs the entitlement before Require reviewer approval can be turned on for a queue at all (Queue settings & limits has the details). Everything below assumes it’s on.

If you hold both the annotator and reviewer roles on the queue, the annotation workspace carries a Workspace action toggle: Annotate my answers next to Review submissions. The toggle only appears when you hold both roles, so a reviewer without the annotator role, or an annotator without the reviewer role, never sees it.

If you only hold the reviewer role, open the queue from its list and use the Review Items button in the header instead, which opens the review workspace directly on the first item pending review.

Whether that button reads Review Items or View Submissions depends on the queue’s Require reviewer approval setting, not on the entitlement: a queue can have the review-workflow entitlement and still show View Submissions if that setting is off. With it off, the workspace is read-only, labelled View submissions instead of Review submissions in the toggle: you can read what was submitted, but there’s nothing to approve or send back.

Compare answers side by side

Opening an item that’s pending review puts you in the comparison panel, which lays out every annotator’s answer for the item side by side instead of one at a time, so you can weigh Response quality from both submissions before deciding. Each answer has its own feedback field for comments scoped to just that answer, and the panel carries the Approve and Request changes actions for the item as a whole.

Approve or request changes

Two actions sit in the comparison panel: Approve, which moves the item to completed, and Request changes, which sends it back to the annotator.

  • Approve takes no note at all, and is disabled the moment you type any feedback into the panel
  • Request changes stays disabled until you’ve left a note in the Whole-item feedback box or targeted feedback on at least one answer
  • Approve is also unavailable while an earlier request for changes on the item is still open; it has to be addressed first before Approve is available again

Note

You can’t review an item you annotated yourself. Approve and Request changes don’t render at all on an item you submitted answers for, even if you also hold the reviewer role on the queue.

Once the annotator resubmits, the item lands back in pending review the same way it did the first time, so it reappears in your Items tab list for another look.

Leave targeted feedback

When the problem is one specific answer rather than the whole item, click Feedback on that annotator’s row to open a feedback field scoped to that answer: Clear discards what you’ve typed, Done closes it. That’s the targeted alternative to a whole-item note when only one annotator’s answer needs fixing. Filling in this field, or the whole-item note, is what enables Request changes; clearing it back out is what re-enables Approve.

Approve in bulk

When there’s nothing to argue with, you don’t have to open every item on its own. From the queue’s Items tab, select the items you want to clear and click Approve Selected. It counts only the items in your selection that are pending review, and it only appears once at least one selected item is.

Comment threads

Every review action (comment, approve, or request changes) drops into a thread scoped to the item or to one specific answer. A thread moves through open, addressed, resolved, and reopened as reviewers and annotators go back and forth.

You can @mention teammates in a comment, up to 50 per comment.

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