The WIMP remains dark matter's most-central literature candidate even as its role bridging astrophysics and particle physics has weakened sharply since 2015

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Using a frozen NASA Astrophysics Data System snapshot of 201,627 unique records (143,390 with arXiv classifications, indexed 21 May 2026, through publication year 2025), Allzén (2026) finds that astrophysics remains the larger field by aggregated primary classification throughout 2010–2025 — 48.7% of classified papers in 2025 against 26.8% for high-energy physics — even though the single arXiv class hep-ph first overtakes astro-ph.CO in 2015. Separately, in a concept co-occurrence network built from paper abstracts, the WIMP-related node (combining generic WIMP, neutralino, LSP, Higgsino, gravitino, and sneutrino mentions) remains the single most central dark-matter candidate by prevalence-weighted spectral centrality across the whole literature, in both 2006–2015 and 2016–2025.

What changes is not centrality but connectivity: the WIMP node's normalized cross-field betweenness — how much it sits on shortest paths linking astrophysics-oriented and particle-physics-oriented concepts — falls from 0.073 in 2006–2015 to 0.031 in 2016–2025. Node-removal analysis sharpens the same point: deleting the WIMP node cuts cross-field connectivity efficiency by 41.5% in the earlier period but only 6.2% in the later one, where Axion+ALP and primordial black holes now have larger removal effects. The paper's own gloss is that WIMP-related research "remains central across the literature, even as cross-field connections become less concentrated around it" — it has not become marginal, but it has stopped being the thing that ties the two fields' dark-matter literatures together.

This single-author, unrefereed arXiv preprint (Tier 1, the author's own data and analysis) is the direct source for this claim and two others — claim-allzen-four-condition-dark-matter-discovery-framework and claim-wimp-evidential-keystone-role-mid-1980s — reaching the vault's three-claim single-source concentration cap (sources.md); further findings from the same preprint route to question-corroborate-allzen-2610-14137-dark-matter-discovery-framework rather than becoming new claim-notes.