The paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00965 is under review by the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ). In it we apply causal discovery to astronomical data for the first time. We find that in elliptical galaxies it is the properties of the host galaxy that cause the mass of its central supermassive black hole. Viceversa for spiral galaxies. If correct, this solves a long standing issue (a few decades old) in galaxy evolution.
I am second author, the first author being a Ph.D. student from NYUAD (hi Zehao!). My typical paper gets way fewer citations. My h-index is 20, meaning I only have 20 papers with 20 or more citations. In total I have about 60 papers. The third author has similar stats. More senior authors who appear further down the list have many highly cited papers. Yoshua Bengio is a co-author.
1,000
3.00We are presenting related research at the causal representation learning workshop at neurips 2024 in vancouver, where we got accepted with a poster contribution.
My base rate assumption from a quick search is many papers get fewer than 5 citations per year and even impactful ones might not get 50+ over about a year. Since the paper is still under review, I'd update based on it's timeline (publishing/revision) and potential news coverage or knowledge of follow up research or conferences that might boost its visibility. I don't know much about astrophysics, but I could be convinced this is an important foundational paper for further research. My intuition is astrophysics is not an exceedingly fast-paced field though. Bet no and revise upon new information.
Congrats on the research!
@Allan Indeed I can confirm the field is not as fast paced as computer science. Instruments (telescopes mostly) drive progress, and it takes a while to build and exploit those.