Upvotes serve important purposes in online social annotation environments. However, limited studies have explored the influential factors affecting peer upvoting in online collaborative learning. In this study, we analysed the factors influencing students' upvotes received from their peers as 91 participants utilized Perusall, an online social annotation system, for collaborative reading. The participants were asked to collaboratively annotate 29 reading materials in a semester. We collected student reading behaviours and analysed their annotations with a text‐mining tool of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Moreover, conditional inference tree was used to determine the relative importance of explanatory factors to the upvotes students received. The results showed that the high‐upvote group made significantly more annotations, posted more responses to others' annotations and displayed fewer negative emotions in annotations than those who did not receive upvotes. The two groups of students had no significant differences in the upvotes given to others, as well as cognitive activities and positive emotions involved in annotations. Moreover, the number of annotations was the determining factor in predicting the upvotes that one could receive in social annotation activities. This study has significant practical implications regarding providing interventions in social annotation‐based collaborative reading.Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic
Social annotations enhance students' reading experience, facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration, promote high‐quality learning interactions and ultimately lead to improved performance.
In social annotation environments, receiving upvotes from peers is not only a type of feedback but also a form of motivation, social interaction and social validation.
No study has explored the influential factors in peer upvoting within social annotation‐based learning.
What this paper adds
This study was the first to examine social annotations through the lens of the community of inquiry framework.
We investigated the relationships between students' cognitive and social presence in their annotations and the upvotes they received in an online social annotation environment.
Our study revealed the strategies for obtaining upvotes from peers in social annotation‐based learning environments.
Implications for practice and/or policy
The high‐upvote group made significantly more annotations, posted more responses to others' annotations and displayed fewer negative emotions in annotations compared to the low‐upvote group.
The two groups of students did not show significant differences in the upvotes they gave to others or in the cognitive activities and positive emotions involved in annotations.
The number of annotations was the primary factor predicting the number of upvotes received in the collaborative reading.
This study could inform the design of future online social annotation systems to better support collaborative learning and peer interaction.
