Author : Roberto Piazza
What do we really mean by a « good » scientific journal? Do we care more about the short-time impact of our papers, or about the chance that they will still bhe read and cited on the long run?
Here I show that, by regarding a journal as a « virtual scientist » that can be attributed a time-dependent Hirsch h-index, we can introduce a parameter that, arguably, better captures the « persistency » of a scientific publication. Curiously, however, this parameter seems to depend above all on the « thickness » of a journal.
