About the data and method
Corpus. The data come from a snapshot of
OpenAlex taken in
August 2026. The corpus contains 2.87 million works published between 2000 and 2025
in 6,691 journals. A journal is included when at least one third of its output is
classified by OpenAlex's topic model into the subfields "Political Science and
International Relations" or "Sociology and Political Science," at least 10 percent
falls into the former specifically, and the source is a journal rather than a book
series or publishing platform.
Universe and scoring. The ranking covers the 36,614 authors with
at least 5 works and at least 100 citations inside this corpus. Each feature below is
computed from the corpus and converted to a percentile rank across these 36,614
authors; the k-index is the weighted sum of the percentiles.
Limitations. OpenAlex author disambiguation is imperfect: some
scholars' records are split across multiple profiles and common names are sometimes
merged. If your record looks wrong here, it is likely wrong in OpenAlex; claiming
your profile via ORCID fixes the source. Publication years follow OpenAlex, which
often uses the online-first date rather than the issue date. Because the corpus is
journal-based, books and book chapters are essentially absent, which disadvantages
book-oriented subfields. Citation counts include citations from every field OpenAlex
indexes, not only political science. The journal list depends on OpenAlex's topic
model and misclassifies at the margins. Affiliation data was too unreliable to
display. OpenAlex updates monthly, so current counts will drift from this snapshot.
Data: OpenAlex. Site by Kevin Munger.