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.

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Academic

Melissa Lee

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Academic

RankAssociate
As of2026 · CV
DepartmentPenn Political Science
UniversityPenn
FieldPolitical Science
Scholarprofile

Totals

Publications17
Citations985
h-index10 · Scholar
Citations per year in post98.5
Years in post10 from the CV positions

Coverage

Works with a count13 of 17
Share76%

Positions

Director of the World House Student Fellows P…2026–
Klein Family Presidential Associate Professor…2024–
Director of the World House Student Fellows P…2023–2025
Perry World House Faculty Fellow, University…2022–2025
Klein Family Presidential Assistant Professor…2022–2024
Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania2021–2022
Lightning Scholar, University of Pennsylvania2020–2021
Cyril E. Black University Preceptor, Princeto…2019–2022
and 5 more

Top venues 10 venues

The 8 holding the most of these works; 2 more hold at least one.

American Political Science Review2
Governance2
International Organization2
The Journal of Politics2
American Journal of Political Science1
Annual Review of Political Science1
Foreign Affairs1
International Studies Quarterly1

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 17 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
2016Legibility and the Informational Foundations of State CapacityThe Journal of Politicsarticle426
2020Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the Statebook133
2014Taking the State (Back) Out? Statehood and the Delivery of Collective Goods.Governancearticle131
2018The International Politics of Incomplete Sovereignty: How Hostile Neighbors Weaken the State.International Organizationarticle112
2020Literacy and State-Society Interactions in 19th Century France.American Journal of Political Sciencearticle41
2015Aid Externalities: Evidence from PEPFAR in Africa.World Developmentarticle38
2022International Statebuilding and the Domestic Politics of State Development.Annual Review of Political Sciencearticle36
2022Why Territorial Disputes Escalate: The Causes of Conquest Attempts Since 1945.International Studies Quarterlyarticle23
2023War and Welfare in Colonial Algeria.International Organizationarticle22
2020Selling International Law Enforcement: Elite Justifications and Public Values.Research & Politicsarticle16
2024From Pluribus to Unum? The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty in 19th Century America.American Political Science Reviewarticle5
2026Military Service and Immigrants’ Integration: Evidence from the Vietnam Draft Lotteries.American Political Science Reviewarticle2
2015Taking the State (Back) Out? A Reply to Peters and PierreGovernancearticle0
2023The Civil War made the United States “One” from “Many” – but only for Northern Republicansarticle
2021How Not to Build a Statearticle
2019Subversive Statecraft: The Changing Face of Great Power ConflictForeign Affairsarticle
2017LegibilityandtheInformationalFoundationsofStateCapacity.The Journal of Politicsarticle