Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more If you are a researcher studying a niche topic, one of the few ways to get some attention is to give your paper a witty title featuring a pop culture reference. Feedback has long been a fan of such things, but we would never have thought to do what the team led by Gabriel Budel at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands did, which is to get systematic about it. Budel and his colleagues searched two academic databases for papers whose titles contain references to the titles of songs by the Beatles.
They ended up with “2237 exact references and 963 instances of creative wordplay”. That is a lot of Beatles jokes, so without further ado: the most-used Beatles song in academic paper titles is The Long and Winding Road. Budel’s team found 798 examples of this, such as “Do black fintechs matter?
The long and winding road to develop inclusive algorithms for social justice“. It was followed by With a Little Help From My Friends (209), Here, There and Everywhere (129) and Here Comes the Sun (103). Feedback feels that many of these phrases are quite easy to incorporate.
We are more impressed by the 15 research groups apiece that managed to use “Glass onion”, “Strawberry fields forever” and “Norwegian wood (This bird has flown)”. The last of these gave rise to the frankly majestic “Norwegian wood, isn’t it good? Narratives of the lumber industry and development paths in the Nordic periphery“.
We thought it would be really tricky to use something like “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey”, but then we checked and found three papers that explicitly play on this title. The authors also performed a follow-up study looking for paper titles that use Beatles lyrics, yielding such gems as “The hyphen as a segmentation cue in triconstituent compound processing: It’s getting better all the time” and “‘When I find myself in times of trouble…’: The conditional effect of international organisations on policy convergence“. Feedback has one final thought: we wonder if this study reflects the influence of the Ig Nobel prizes, the awards granted for research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think.
The Igs have been running since 1991, which is more than enough time for scientists and funders to realise that they are a potential avenue to scientific success. This study, surely, will be in the running for an Ig at some point – but did the researchers foresee that? We all know what an Oscar bait movie is: it’s probably a historical drama, its lead actor undergoes some sort of difficult physical transformation and it’s not in the least bit funny.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
