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.

Back to the list
Academic

Melissa Lee Sands

close

Academic

RankAssociate
As of2026 · CV
DepartmentCornell Government
UniversityCornell
FieldPolitical Science
Scholarprofile

Totals

Publications7
Citations140
h-index9 · Scholar
Citations per year in post15.6
Years in post9 from the CV positions

Coverage

Works with a count6 of 7
Share86%

Positions

Associate Professor, Cornell University, Broo…2026–
Assistant Professor of Politics and Data Scie…2021–2026
Assistant Professor, University of California…2017–2021
Associate Faculty, Columbia University, Schoo…2010–2010

Top venues 6 venues

American Political Science Review2
American Journal of Political Science1
Annual Review of Political Science1
Nature Human Behaviour1
Political Analysis1
Urban Affairs Review1

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 7 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
2023Context and Contact: Unifying the Study of Environmental Effects on PoliticsAnnual Review of Political Sciencearticle70
2024Stateviolence, partyformation, and electoral accountability: The political legacy of the Marikana massacre.American Political Science Reviewarticle24
2026The policy adjacent: How affordable housing generates policy feedback among neighboring residents.American Journal of Political Sciencearticle16
2023Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streetsNature Human Behaviourarticle16
2025Nationally Representative, Locally Misaligned: The Biases of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Neighborhood PerceptionPolitical Analysisarticle7
2024Inaccuracies in low income housing geocodes: When and why they matterUrban Affairs Reviewarticle7
2024State violence decreases incumbent support in a democracy: The political legacy of the Marikana massacreAmerican Political Science Reviewarticle