Typically, a scholarly article has a section in which the authors acknowledge entities such as funding, technical staff, colleagues, etc.
that have contributed materials or knowledge or have influenced or inspired their work.
Unlike the impact factor, it does not produce a single overall metric, but analyzes the components separately.
The ratio of this total number of citations to the total number of papers in which the acknowledge entity appears can be construed as the impact of that acknowledged entity.
[2][3] The first automated acknowledgment indexing was created in the search engine and digital library, CiteSeer.