Zhang CT. 2009. elationship of the h-index, g-index, and e-index. JASIST online

[Eugene Garfield]

Relationship of the h-index, g-index, and e-index 

Chun-Ting Zhang
Department of Physics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
email: Chun-Ting Zhang (ctzhang at tju.edu.cn)

Index Terms
citation analysis • author productivity • scientometrics

Abstract
Of h-type indices available now, the g-index is an important one in that it
not only keeps some advantages of the h-index but also counts citations from
highly cited articles. However, the g-index has a drawback that one has to
add fictitious articles with zero citation to calculate this index in some
important cases. Based on an alternative definition without introducing
fictitious articles, an analytical method has been proposed to calculate the
g-index based approximately on the h-index and the e-index. If citations for
a scientist are ranked by a power law, it is shown that the g-index can be
calculated accurately by the h-index, the e-index, and the power parameter.
The relationship of the h-, g-, and e-indices presented here shows that the
g-index contains the citation information from the h-index, the e-index, and
some papers beyond the h-core.

Received: 25 August 2009; Revised: 14 October 2009; Accepted: 14 October 2009

Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1002/asi.21274

URL: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123196153/abstract