Acknowledging code review contributions in academic projects

Question

In the context of academia, consider the following scenario: a person, such as a PhD student or postdoc, shares parts of their code related to a scientific project on this platform and receives valuable reviews that greatly improve their project.

Should the person who posted the question acknowledge the reviewers' contributions in their paper or on their GitHub repository? If the answer is yes, how can this be effectively done considering that some users may not be using their real names?

I have conducted a thorough search on the CR meta, but I could not find a question addressing this specific issue, although I did come across two somewhat related questions:

Should I give credits to reviewers when I post revised code?

How closely can code on this site be copied into other projects?

Answer 1

Should the person who posted the question acknowledge the reviewers' contributions in their paper or on their GitHub repository?
— x27ca61a in Acknowledging code review contributions in academic projects © CC BY-SA 4.0

The license you provide the code under, and we provide our changes under are CC BY-SA 2.5-4.0. As such you need to follow the license.

Attribution — You must give [appropriate credit¹], provide a link to the license, and [indicate if changes were made²]. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

1. If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a licence notice, a disclaimer note, and a link to the material. CC licences prior to Version 4.0 also require you to provide the title of the material if supplied, and other slight differences.
2. In 4.0, you must indicate if you modified the material and retain an indication of previous modifications. In 3.0 and earlier licence versions, the indication of changes is only required if you create a derivative.

— Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) © CC BY 4.0. I have changed the hyperlinks to [name<sup>num</sup>] and entered the pop-up text to be in an ordered list. — Peilonrayz in Peilonrayz' answer to "Acknowledging code review contributions in academic projects" © CC BY 4.0

Reading Best practices for attribution shows what good attribution is. Basically boiling down to Title, Author, Source and License (TASL).

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how can this be effectively done considering that some users may not be using their real names?
— x27ca61a in Acknowledging code review contributions in academic projects © CC BY-SA 4.0

The human readable summaries don't explicitly answer your question. However, the full legal document should.

[3(a)(1)] If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must:

[3(a)(1)(A)(i)] identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated);
— Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License © CC BY 4.0. I have changed the references [3(a)...] to better support a flat structure. — Peilonrayz in Peilonrayz' answer to "Acknowledging code review contributions in academic projects" © CC BY 4.0