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
Value Statistic Unit

Departments, across fields

Field index · the median department of each field is 100
1 Harvard Government Harvard · Political Science 247
2 Columbia English Columbia · English 224
3 Columbia Political Science Columbia · Political Science 208
4 Harvard Chemistry Harvard · Chemistry 197
5 Princeton Chemistry Princeton · Chemistry 170
6 Yale Chemistry Yale · Chemistry 164
7 Cornell English Cornell · English 131
8 Yale English Yale · English 120
9 Penn Political Science Penn · Political Science 118
10 Brown Chemistry Brown · Chemistry 110
11 Dartmouth Government Dartmouth · Political Science 109
12 Princeton English Princeton · English 106
13 Brown English Brown · English 94
14 Princeton Politics Princeton · Political Science 91
15 Penn Chemistry Penn · Chemistry 90
16 Columbia Chemistry Columbia · Chemistry 84
17 Penn English Penn · English 84
18 Yale Political Science Yale · Political Science 82
19 Cornell Chemistry Cornell · Chemistry 51
20 Dartmouth English Dartmouth · English 51
21 Harvard English Harvard · English 50
22 Cornell Government Cornell · Political Science 47
23 Brown Political Science Brown · Political Science 46
24 Dartmouth Chemistry Dartmouth · Chemistry 42

3,494,384 citations over 23,252 of 30,481 works (76% carry a count). 540 of 772 academics have at least one counted work. A work with no citation count is unknown here, never a zero.

Field index by department

Citations per academic against the field median
Series: value.Dartmouth GovernmentDartmouth Government 109109 · Political Science020406080100DepartmentField index (100 is the median department of its field)

Coverage differs by field - Chemistry 84%, Political Science 70%, English 58% of the selected works carry a citation count - so the index compares standing within a field and never absolute impact across fields.

Notes

A department’s index is its citations per academic divided by the median citations per academic of the departments of its own field, times 100. The median is over the departments these filters keep, so narrowing to three departments of a field moves the field’s own middle.

Raw citations only (docs/ui-redesign.md section 5): the citation weighting and the publication count do not move this tab. The statistic and the unit do.

The 1 highest of 24 departments; the list above holds them all.

Citations per academic by field

Where each field’s departments sit on citations per academic
Statistic Unit
Series: Lowest department, Median department, Highest department.05,00010,00015,00020,000Political Science Lowest department Brown Political Science 1,7781,778Political Science Median department 8 measured 3,8803,880Political Science Highest department Harvard Government 9,5779,577Chemistry Lowest department Dartmouth Chemistry 4,1504,150Chemistry Median department 8 measured 9,9799,979Chemistry Highest department Harvard Chemistry 19,65019,650English Lowest department Harvard English 5151English Median department 8 measured 103103English Highest department Columbia English 230230Political ScienceChemistryEnglishCitations per academicField

Lowest departmentMedian departmentHighest department

The spread of the departments inside each field, on one axis: the middle bar is the median that anchors that field’s index, and the distance between the outer two is what an index of 120 is measured against.

University rollup

The mean index of a university’s departments
Series: value.ColumbiaColumbia 172172 · 3 departmentsHarvardHarvard 165165 · 3 departmentsYaleYale 122122 · 3 departmentsPrincetonPrinceton 122122 · 3 departmentsPennPenn 9797 · 3 departmentsBrownBrown 8484 · 3 departmentsCornellCornell 7676 · 3 departmentsDartmouthDartmouth 6767 · 3 departments050100150UniversityMean field index

Each university’s departments averaged on the index, which is the only figure of theirs that crosses fields. A department with no index is out of the mean and the end of the bar says how many were in it.

Coverage by field

Works carrying a citation count
Series: value.ChemistryChemistry 8484% · 12,982 of 15,460 worksPolitical SciencePolitical Science 7070% · 8,814 of 12,529 worksEnglishEnglish 5858% · 1,456 of 2,492 works020406080FieldPer cent of the selected works with a citation count

Coverage differs by field - Chemistry 84%, Political Science 70%, English 58% of the selected works carry a citation count - so the index compares standing within a field and never absolute impact across fields.

Notes

A work takes its verified Scholar profile’s count, else OpenAlex’s; a work with neither is unknown and is never filled in with a zero (docs/definitions.md section 6). Books and chapters are covered worst, which is why the fields that write them sit lowest here.