Trackademia

Welcome to Trackademia

The idea behind Trackademia is to build on existing academic databases like Google Scholar and OpenAlex so that you can trust the data and use it for whatever you want. That comes down to two things.

More data, and more ways to use it. We aggregate publication data from every major source into a single dataset and add information pulled from faculty CVs. Then we let you slice it however you want: choose which sources to build from, write your own formulas, weight journals, adjust for department size.

More accurate, and honest about where it isn’t. We focus on a smaller set of schools so we can verify everything carefully. Faculty lists come from department websites rather than being inferred from publication records, so we know who should be in the data before we go looking. When we can’t find data on someone, we record the gap instead of dropping them. Every number comes with a coverage rate you can check against ground truth.

Everything in Trackademia is built from seven units. AI merges duplicate records across sources and tags each publication so these categories hold up:

  • Publication — citation counts, authors, journal, peer review status, and more
  • Publication group — versions of the same work combined into one entity, such as a working paper and the article it became
  • Academic
  • Department
  • University
  • Field
  • Journal

There are two modes. In Database mode you browse the underlying records and filter by any of the seven units. In Analytics mode you get graphs and comparisons, and you switch views to compare two departments, compare one department against the average of the others, or see them all at once. Tabs let you focus on a particular level of the data.
Trackademia
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Academic

Zachary Lesser

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Academic

RankDistinguished
As of2025 · CV
DepartmentPenn English
UniversityPenn
FieldEnglish
Scholarprofile

Totals

Publications23
Citations914
h-index16 · Scholar
Citations per year in post36.6
Years in post25 from the CV positions

Coverage

Works with a count19 of 23
Share83%

Positions

Visiting Professor, Sapienza University of Ro…2025–2025
Edward W. Kane Professor of English, Universi…2020–
Visiting Professor, University of Bologna2018–2019
Dorothy Ford Wiley Visiting Professorship, Un…2018–2018
Astor Visiting Lectureship, Oxford University2016–2016
Professor, University of Pennsylvania2015–2020
Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvan…2009–2015
Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvan…2006–2009
and 1 more

Top venues 8 venues

Shakespeare Quarterly6
ELH2
English Literary Renaissance2
American Literary History1
Literature Compass1
Medical Entomology and Zoology1
ROMARD1
University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks1

Publications per year

Works this academic published in each year, by the year each work appeared; an undated work is in no year, and a work two colleagues wrote counts for each of them. The kind, works and year filters decide which works are here at all.

Citations per year

Citations received in each year, from this academic’s verified Scholar profile, which counts every citation to everything they ever wrote: no publication filter reaches this line - not the kinds, not the works switch, not the year window on publication - and no journal weight either. It is a profile total, so it does not match the works listed below.

Publications 23 works

Every work these filters select, most cited first and the works with no count at the end: a work nobody has a figure for is unknown, never a zero to be ranked among the works that have one, and it prints an em dash. Each figure is that work’s own citations - Scholar’s count where there is one, else OpenAlex’s - and is not weighted.

YearTitleVenueKindCitations
2004Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade—book260
2008The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional PlaysShakespeare Quarterlyarticle174
2005The Popularity of Playbooks RevisitedShakespeare Quarterlyarticle117
2000Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660ROMARDarticle66
2021Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée—book44
2015Hamlet after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean TextUniversity of Pennsylvania Press eBooksbook42
1999Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning PestleEnglish Literary Renaissancearticle42
2007Tragical-Comical-Pastoral-Colonial: Economic Sovereignty, Globalization, and the Form of TragicomedyELHarticle39
2005Structures of Popularity in the Early Modern Book TradeShakespeare Quarterlyarticle32
2006Textual Conversations in the Renaissance: Ethics, Authors, Technologies—edited volume29
2002Mixed Government and Mixed Marriage in A King and No King: Sir Henry Neville Reads Beaumont and FletcherELHarticle17
2019The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction—edited volume15
2008Early Modern Digital Scholarship and DEEP: Database of Early English PlaybooksLiterature Compassarticle10
2019Xeroxing the Renaissance: The Material Text of Early Modern StudiesShakespeare Quarterlyarticle9
2019The Material Text Between General and Particular, Edition and CopyEnglish Literary Renaissancearticle8
2016The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text: Essays in Honor of David Scott Kastan—edited volume3
2007Mystic Ciphers: Shakespeare and Intelligent Design: A Response to Nancy GlazenerAmerican Literary Historyarticle3
2024What Happened to Edwin Forrest’s Burned First Folio? The Power of Cataloguing and the Logic of DiscoveryShakespeare Quarterlyarticle2
2001The politics of publication : the never-writers and ever-readers of early Stuart dramaMedical Entomology and Zoologybook2
2025The Politics of Book History, Then and Now—edited volume—
2025“Who Saw What When”: The Curious Incident of the Printed Book in the Manuscript CollectionShakespeare Quarterlyarticle—
2023General editor, Arden Insights. Companion volumes to the Arden Shakespeare. Volumes published: William Shakespeare: A Brief Life, by Paul Menzer (2023); Shakes…—edited volume—
2006The Noble Spanish Soldier, by Thomas Dekker—book—