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 1,061 faculty here, 810 have a Scholar profile. Last refreshed 2026-09-28.
OpenAlex covers the remaining 251 people, who have no Scholar profile we could find. Those figures are marked OpenAlex everywhere they appear. OpenAlex is journal-centric and normally reports fewer citations than Scholar for the same person, so those numbers are very likely 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. 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 2026-09-27.
Anyone shown with an OpenAlex figure can move to the Scholar series by creating a Scholar profile. We re-check for new profiles each semester.
How often it updates
OpenAlex monthly, Google Scholar quarterly, 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.
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. A common name can pick up another researcher's record, particularly on the OpenAlex side. Matches were reviewed, but not all of them.
- Scholar counts are generous. They include citations from preprints, theses and self-citations, and they change from week to week.
- 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