How to acknowledge/cite reviewers?
Matti presents his stances on how to deal with authorship of papers. It came to my mind, how to cope with the information and ideas one receives in reviews?
Reviews are usually blind in at least one way, the reviewer shall not know the authors and the authors (and this is the most usual case, imho) shall never know who the reviewers were. However, what if one gets such a bright review that will open new horizons? And after that, one will actually publish a paper with that idea? In that case, I think the reviewer shall be at least acknowledged. Agreed?
There is also a more peculiar case: what if the review contains something that (e.g.) you think demonstrates how the practice in your field sucks? Can you then use the information in a presentation? Or as an argument? “According to one of the reviewers, ‘computer science education is a field dominated by constructivism: (therefore, only) few studies are evaluative or experimental.’” What to do with this when your work is about the lack of evaluation in CSEd? :)
I think that traditionally reviewers are acknowledged only in the acknowledgment section; “The authors wish to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments” (even though the comments would be far from constructive).
I don’t think that the reviewers are usually cited because, after all, their comments are just opinions…?
About the constructive comments: here is an excellent example of the cover letter for journal manuscript resubmissions in which the authors very warmly thanks the reviewers and the edtorial board for their work and useful comments. Next time, when you have to do such a letter, remember to use this one as a template:
http://astron.berkeley.edu/~mwhite/referee_funny.html