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hg-Index (Composite Hirsch-Egghe)×e-Index (Excess Citations)×
FieldBibliometricsBibliometrics
FamilyProcess / pipelineProcess / pipeline
Year of origin20102009
OriginatorSergio Alonso, Francisco J. Cabrerizo, Enrique Herrera-Viedma & Francisco HerreraChun-Ting Zhang
TypeComposite author impact indexAuthor-level excess-citation impact index
Seminal sourceAlonso, S., Cabrerizo, F. J., Herrera-Viedma, E., & Herrera, F. (2010). hg-index: a new index to characterize the scientific output of researchers based on the h- and g-indices. Scientometrics, 82(2), 391-400. DOI ↗Zhang, C.-T. (2009). The e-index, complementing the h-index for excess citations. PLoS ONE, 4(5), e5429. DOI ↗
AliasesAlonso hg-index, hg index, composite h-g indexZhang e-index, excess citation index, e index
Related33
SummaryThe hg-index, proposed by Alonso, Cabrerizo, Herrera-Viedma, and Herrera in 2010, fuses the two best-known author metrics into a single composite. The h-index is robust but ignores how heavily an author's top papers are cited, while Egghe's g-index rewards those highly cited papers but can be swayed by a single outlier. The hg-index takes the geometric mean of the two, producing a value that lies between them and inherits a balance of their strengths: it remains close to the stable h-index while still responding to the citation impact captured by g. The authors showed that the geometric mean stays nearer to the smaller, more conservative h-index than the larger g-index, tempering the latter's sensitivity to extreme papers.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.
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ScholarGateCompare methods: hg-Index (Composite Hirsch-Egghe) · e-Index (Excess Citations). Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/compare