Quoted from JPA/EJB 3.0 Specification:
The following rules apply to bidirectional relationships:
• The inverse side of a bidirectional relationship must refer to its owning side by use of the mappedBy element of the OneToOne, OneToMany, or ManyToMany annotation. The mappedBy element designates the property or field in the entity that is the owner of the relationship.
• The many side of one-to-many / many-to-one bidirectional relationships must be the owning side, hence the mappedBy element cannot be specified on the ManyToOne annotation.
• For one-to-one bidirectional relationships, the owning side corresponds to the side that contains the corresponding foreign key.
• For many-to-many bidirectional relationships either side may be the owning side.