Should I provide specific acknowledgments in addition to a general acknowledgment? As a student I wrote a paper for a course. I am now preparing the paper for submission to a journal. My teacher will get a general acknowledgment for the discussions we had on the topic as a footnote on the paper's title (as is the custom in my field). There are a couple (~3) very specific pointers the teacher gave me, such as a relevant piece of literature. These are not vital for the flow of the paper but are useful pointers for the reader; they appear in footnotes. Should I add a sentence to such a footnote such as "I am grateful to John Doe for this reference"? Or is it kind of implicit in the general acknowledgment at the start of the article that the acknowledged persons have contributed such details?
I've often seen specific points included along with general thanks in a single footnote, something like "I thank my supervisor, John Doe, for numerous helpful discussions and, in particular, for calling my attention to reference [7] and for simplifying the proof of Lemma 2."