A real electron beam has finite width, which has been almost universally ignored in electron‐beam‐induced current (EBIC) theories. Obvious examples are point‐source‐based EBIC analyses, which neglect both the finite volume of electron–hole carriers generated by an energetic electron beam of negligible width and the beamwidth when it is no longer negligible. Gaussian source‐based analyses are more realistic but the beamwidth has not been included, partly because the generation volume is much larger than the beamwidth, but this is not always the case. In this article Donolato’s Gaussian source‐based EBIC equation is generalized to include the beamwidth of a Gaussian beam. This generalized equation is then used to study three problems: (1) the effect of beamwidth on EBIC line scans and on effective diffusion lengths and the results are applied to the analysis of the EBIC data of Dixon, Williams, Das, and Webb; (2) unresolved questions raised by others concerning the applicability of the Watanabe–Actor–Gatos method to real EBIC data to evaluate surface recombination velocity; (3) the effect of beamwidth on the methods proposed recently by the author to determine the surface recombination velocity and to discriminate between the Everhart–Hoff and Kanaya–Okayama ranges which is the correct one to use for analyzing EBIC line scans. ©1995 American Institute of Physics.