e-Index (Excess Citations)

The e-index, proposed by Chun-Ting Zhang in 2009, isolates the citations that the h-index throws away. Inside the h-core of an author's h most-cited papers, the h-index implicitly credits each paper with only h citations and discards everything above that, even though top papers may have far more. The e-index recovers exactly this surplus: it is the square root of the difference between the total citations of the h-core and the h-squared citations that the h-index already accounts for. Zhang designed it as a complement rather than a replacement for the h-index, so that the pair (h, e) together describe both the size of an author's productive core and the concentration of excess impact within it.