I don’t have the ansswer but have sent this to some of our academic researchers.

Acknowledgements are not required. They are generally reserved for funders; any group/agency/individual who supported your efforts in some way; people who helped significantly with recruitment, data collection, or analysis; or team members who contributed to the work but are not co-authors (don’t thank people for peer review – it is a “required” and anonymous professional service).

I have not included acknowledgements in my manuscripts.

If you include an acknowledgement, it would be the bare minimum number of words. (“The team would like to acknowledge students X, Y, and Z for their assistance with recruitment and data collection.”)

When in doubt, look up (ideally well cited) articles in your target journals and see what they have included and how they formatted it. Practically everything in manuscript writing is dependent on the journal.

Anyone who helped you and whom you feel like thanking publicly and lastingly, as long as there’s no embarrassment or unwanted attention for anyone.

That might include volunteers (as a group) who were subjects, someone who lent you premises or facilities or equipment, parents or partners or kids who put up with your long hours and endless discussion, a custodian who brought you coffee and rolls at 4 a.m., an editor who smoothed your prose, caught your typos and ambiguities, and painstakingly applied the style guide to your bibliography, or anyone else who gave your team significant support.

You could thank your peer reviewers without naming them: “We are grateful to our peer reviewers for…”

I’ve edited and proofread a lot of academic work and not seen a huge number of acknowledgments. But authors of fiction seem to like to thank everybody, including the dog.

Really, it’s a privileged section where you can say pretty much what you want within the definition of an acknowledgment.

If you’re publishing in the U.S, drop the e after the g.