Scientists seeking to make a dry academic paper more engaging often get by with a little help from the Beatles, according to a study published today in PLOS ONE.
The Fab Four are referenced here, there, and everywhere in the scientific literature, the researchers find, with the titles of at least 3200 peer-reviewed papers across disciplines quoting or making puns related to their song names or lyrics. This far outnumbers allusions to other top artists, suggesting the Beatles are uniquely adored across the (academic) universe, the researchers say.
Pop culture references can help papers stand out among the millions published each year, says Ken Hyland, a linguist at the University of East Anglia who was not involved in the work. “Titles, highlights, and abstracts need to grab attention—often with something unexpected. Otherwise, the paper is just fed into the gaping mouth of the machine.”
The new study is the brainchild of Beatles megafans Michiel Tjepkema, a law researcher at Radboud University, and Robert Kooij, a network scientist at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), who met at a Beatles convention 3 years ago. Sandwiched into a very musical program, Tjepkema gave a short talk on how scientists were using Beatles references in scientific articles, a phenomenon he’d noticed after a colleague published a paper referencing The Long and Winding Road.
Kooij, who was in the front row for the talk, approached Tjepkema afterward to suggest they come together to study the phenomenon systematically. Gabriel Budel, another network scientist at TU Delft, then joined the team. (Although Budel didn’t begin as a megafan, he “might have been stung by the Beatles bug through this article,” Tjepkema says hopefully.)
The researchers first compiled a list of Beatles songs or famous lyrics, excluding common words and phrases such as “because” or “a day in the life.” They then searched the academic database Scopus for papers that matched these titles and lyrics exactly, such as “A ticket to ride: The unintended consequences of school transport subsidies,” and “A hard day’s night: Time use in shift workers.”
The team then used OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) GPT-4o-mini to assess whether papers that only partially matched their song titles and lyrics were wordplays on Beatles tracks. The LLM found puns including “The lung and winding road: Inflammation-driven platelet reactivity in Long COVID” and “Help! I need a WNT antibody. Help! Not just any antibody.”
The researchers found 2237 exact matches and 963 wordplays across fields from engineering to dentistry. Beatles references began to increase in the 1990s, which the authors put down to a generational effect: This is when ’60s kids were becoming academics. The band was also referenced far more than the next two best selling artists, Michael Jackson and Elvis. The 10 most referenced Beatles songs found their way into 1584 papers, compared with just 65 references for the top 10 Jackson songs and 196 for Elvis. “Since almost everybody likes and loves the Beatles, it’s kind of logical to make titles which refer to them,” Tjepkema says.
The researchers didn’t look at how the publications referencing the Beatles fared. But other work has shown pop culture references and humor can boost engagement, says Steve Heard, an ecologist at the University of New Brunswick. In a 2023 analysis of ecology and evolution papers, Heard found that authors seemed to give funnier titles to less important papers—but once the importance of the papers was considered, those with funnier titles had higher citation rates.
Scientists may be worried they won’t be taken seriously if using humor—and some journals do not allow humorous titles. (The authors of the new paper, which is titled “How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles,” had to request an exemption from PLOS.) But attitudes are changing. “I think the rigidness of scientific writing has been relaxed,” says Arun Chandrasekaran, a nanoscientist at the University at Albany who has written on pop culture and science.
Adding elements of fun to a paper can also make it more accessible, says Kristin Sainani, an epidemiologist at Stanford University who teaches science writing. When scientists see that writing doesn’t always have to be stiff and formal, they are less likely to use jargony, bloated prose.
In perhaps the best evidence that quoting the Beatles doesn’t detract from serious work, the 2017 paper that laid the blueprint for LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude was titled “Attention Is All You Need.” Within the world of artificial intelligence, that paper appears in every little thing: To date, it has been cited more than 268,000 times.
Think for yourself, then, when choosing a title. And remember, if you say you want a (scientific) revolution, don’t be afraid of a bit of fun. The End.