A Survey on Annotations in Information Visualization: Empirical Studies, Applications and Challenges

Annotations are widely used in information visualization to guide attention, clarify patterns, and support interpretation. We present a comprehensive survey of 191 research papers describing empirical studies, tools, techniques, and systems that incorporate annotations across various visualization contexts. Based on a structured analysis, we characterize annotations by their types, generation methods, and targets, and examine their use across four primary application domains: user engagement, storytelling, collaboration, and exploratory data analysis. We also discuss key trends, practical challenges, and open research directions. These findings offer a foundation for designing more effective annotation systems and advancing future research on annotation in visualization. An interactive web resource detailing the surveyed papers is available at https://shape-vis.github.io/annotation_star/.