Methods

Where these numbers come from

This project continues a dataset Tom Sanchez maintained by hand from 2017 to 2026. It is now collected on a schedule, stored as a running record, and published from a public repository.

Sources, in order of preference

Google Scholar is the headline source. It counts books, reports and other non-journal work that matters in planning, and it is what the field is used to seeing. Of the 1,063 faculty here, 804 have a Scholar profile. Last refreshed 2026-11-09.

OpenAlex covers 241 people who have no Scholar profile we could find. Those figures are marked OpenAlex everywhere they appear. OpenAlex normally reports fewer citations than Scholar for the same person, and the main reason is not which papers it indexes but which citing documents it does: a citation counts only when the citing work is itself indexed and its reference list has been parsed. Citations from reports, theses, books and working papers, which carry much of planning's influence, are largely invisible to it, while Scholar counts whatever it can crawl. Across the faculty here with both figures, OpenAlex typically counts about three fifths of the Scholar total, and each person's page shows their own share beside that. Those numbers are undercounts and are not comparable to the Scholar ones. We do not adjust or scale them; we label them. Where OpenAlex has split one person across several author records, we add the records together, and where its summary for a record falls behind the works it files under that record, we recompute the figures from the works. An OpenAlex record is used however small it is: a person whose record holds four citations is shown with four, and a Scholar profile is the way to a fuller figure. Last refreshed 2026-11-02.

Publish or Perish is the source of last resort. 18 people have neither a Scholar profile nor an OpenAlex record we could match, so they keep the figure from Tom's final lookup in February 2026, marked PoP. Publish or Perish reads Google Scholar's search results rather than a profile, so those figures are of the same kind as the Scholar ones, but they were assembled by hand and are frozen: they will not change until the person gains a Scholar profile or an OpenAlex record, and nobody is added on a Publish or Perish figure now.

Anyone shown with an OpenAlex or Publish or Perish figure can move to the Scholar series by creating a Scholar profile. We search for new profiles daily.

How often it updates

OpenAlex monthly; Google Scholar on a rolling schedule of about fifty profiles a week, oldest reading first, so each profile is re-read roughly every fifteen weeks; faculty rosters twice a year. Every run is appended, never overwritten, so the history builds up from the first snapshot in February and March 2026 rather than being reconstructed backwards.

Who is included

Regular full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty at planning programs in the United States and Canada: the population Tom tracked. Adjunct, visiting and clinical appointments are out. The school list began as the membership of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and has a handful of programs added on request, mostly Canadian. Each program page says which it is.

Since October 2026 the site also lists planning scholars in other departments: people with a PhD from a North American planning doctoral program, a tenured or tenure-track appointment in the United States or Canada outside a tracked planning program, and research that sits in planning. They are shown beside the rankings, never in them, and do not enter any percentile or department figure. The list came from a search of planning PhD programs' alumni and of the units where planning PhDs commonly land, and it is incomplete.

Percentiles and per-year figures

Percentiles are computed across the faculty in this dataset, both overall and within academic rank, so a percentile means "relative to the people on this site", not to all of academia. Citations per year divides total citations by years since the PhD, which flatters nobody consistently: it favours people whose early work was widely cited and penalises anyone whose PhD year we have wrong.

Known ways this is wrong

• Profiles lag reality. Appointments are updated from what a Scholar profile says, so someone who moved but has not updated their profile stays put here.
• Name collisions, in both directions. A common name can pick up another researcher's record, particularly on the OpenAlex side; matches are reviewed and we remove the ones we find. The reverse error is harder to see and harder to fix: OpenAlex can fail to attach a person's own work to their record, splitting it into fragments or leaving it unassigned, and this falls hardest on very common surnames, East Asian surnames among them. Our review catches strangers added to a record; it cannot restore work OpenAlex never attached. An ORCID on the person's publications is the one lever that reliably helps.
• Scholar counts are generous. They include citations from preprints, theses and self-citations, and they change from week to week.
• Subfields do not publish alike. A transportation modeller and a qualitative community-development scholar write into different streams with different citation habits, and tenure committees in planning compare people within their subfield for that reason. The site compares within academic rank only, so a figure here says less about a person's standing in their own subfield than the precision of the number suggests.
• Missing people. New hires appear only after the next roster review, and anyone recorded as having left a tracked program drops out of the site entirely, so a search for them returns nothing even though their earlier figures remain in the downloadable data.

The site is in beta, so expect all of the above to be more common now than it will be later. Corrections are welcome and quick to apply: email Alex Karner at planning-citations@austin.utexas.edu, or open an issue. If you would rather not have an individual page here at all, say so and it will be removed.

Get the data

Everything is public. The curated roster and every dated snapshot live as CSV in the repository; the built database, with the percentile and summary views already defined, is one file:

citations.sqlite · pipeline source

Please cite it as: Karner, A. and T. W. Sanchez (2026). Planning Citation Metrics. https://github.com/aakarner/planning-citation-metrics