This paper presents three methods to experimentally extract the thermal resistance of bipolar transistors taking into account the Early effect. The approaches are improved variants of recently-proposed techniques relying on common-base DC measurements. The accuracy is numerically verified by making use of a compact model calibrated on I-V characteristics of state-of-the-art SOG BJTs and SiGe:C HBTs. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.