Acknowledgment index

An acknowledgment index is a experimental method for analyzing the scientific literature; it  quantifies the  acknowledgements in scientific journals. Typically, such an article has a section where the authors acknowledge funding, technical staff, and colleagues that have contributed materials or knowledge. Like the citation index it measures influences on scientific work, but in a different sense; it measures institutional and economic influences as well as informal influences of individual people. Unlike impact factor, it does not produce a single overall metric, but analyses the componenets separately.