This comes from the historical origin of sum rules in the early days of quantum theory. It's summed over energy levels. The first sum rules where the Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn and the Bethe sum rules. It's nicely described in Wikipedia,
In deep inelastic scattering one derives sum rules from structure Functions F(x,Q²) integrating over x where x is the fraction of the nucleon momentum carried by the scattering quark. So sum rules give us e.g. the fraction of energy, spin, etc. of the nucleon carried e.g. by a specific quark flavour.