  Heavy-tailed networks are often characterized in the literature by their
degree distribution's similarity to a power law. However, many heavy-tailed
networks in real life do not have power-law degree distributions, and in many
applications the scale-free nature of the network is irrelevant so long as the
network possesses hubs. Here we present the Cooke-Nieboer index (CNI), a
non-asymptotic measure of the heavy-tailedness of a network's degree
distribution which does not presume a power-law form. The CNI is easy to
calculate, and clearly distinguishes between networks with power-law,
exponential, and symmetric degree distributions.
