Want a catchy paper title? All you need is a Beatles lyric

Lennon and McCartney may have charted The Long and Winding Road, but generations of researchers since have followed equally tortuous paths to crowbar lyrics by the Beatles into the titles of their journal papers.

A new study has found that songs by the Liverpudlian rock band have been referenced thousands of times in the scientific literature, with a trawl of the Scopus academic database and Google Scholar identifying 2,237 exact references and a further 963 instances of “creative wordplay” inspired by their output.

It was The Long and Winding Road that was far and away mentioned most frequently, on 798 occasions. It was followed by With a Little Help from My Friends, on 209, and Here, There and Everywhere, with 129. Catchy examples include articles titled “A hard day’s night: Time use in shift workers”; “Uzbek health care – no longer back in the USSR”; and “Norwegian wood, isn’t it good? Narratives of the lumber industry and development paths in the Nordic periphery”.

Examples of Beatles-inspired wordplay in titles included “The lung and winding road: Inflammation-driven platelet reactivity in Long Covid”; “Will you still need me, will you still screen me, when I’m past 64? Breast screening policy is based on ageism”; and “Ticket to divide: m6A reader YTHDC1 drives acute myeloid leukemia proliferation”.

The study, “How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles: Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature using large language models”, published in Plos One on 9 September, describes itself as the first cross-disciplinary account of how the band’s lyrics have spread through scientific writing.

Authors Gabriel Budel, Robert Koolk and Michiel Tjepkema found that references to Beatles lyrics accelerated rapidly from the early 1990s onwards, outstripping the growth in scientific publishing.

Noting the digitisation of journals over that period, the trio suggest that in an increasingly crowded field, “scholars faced growing pressure to stand out, and referencing one of the most globally recognised cultural phenomena became a natural and accessible rhetorical strategy”.

“Decades after the band’s heyday, the Beatles still find their way into the titles of scientific papers. When researchers reach for a familiar song, they borrow a phrase their readers already know and, in doing so, reach out to them,” they conclude.

“How far such references actually shape whether a paper is found, read, and remembered is a question worth pursuing. But our results already suggest that, now and then, science really does get by with a little help from the Beatles.”

frances.jones@timeshighereducation.com