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Paper writer
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”.
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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. Is this study of Beatles lyrics in scientific papers perhaps an example of Ig Nobel bait?
Love me do
Speaking of the Ig Nobels, this year’s prizes were bestowed on 3 September. The winners came together at a ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland. It was the first time the Ig Nobel ceremony had been held outside the US, on the grounds that “it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country”, said founder Marc Abrahams. Eesh.
Ten prizes were awarded in total. The biomechanics prize went to a three-person team that developed a new definition of kissing. Kissing, it seems, is “non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”. Feedback’s immediate thought was that this seemed to exclude kissing people on the cheek, and indeed it does. Then we delved into the paper and discovered there is a possibility that kissing evolved from premastication: chewing food in your mouth before sharing it with someone else. We should have known better than to read on.
Can’t buy me love
We will pass swiftly over the economics prize, which recognises work showing that upper-class people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour. Thanks, we know; the more pressing issue is stopping them.
Instead, we will move to the biology prize, given to the authors of a 2024 study “for gently stepping on various parts of various venomous snakes – repeatedly, at various temperatures at various times of day – to try to learn what does and what does not induce a venomous snake to bite a human”.
Feedback actually found ourselves having a sense-of-humour failure about this: we get the idea, but isn’t it a bit, well, cruel? So we looked it up and learned that the editors retracted the study in February 2025, on the grounds that “The Animal Ethics Committee of Butantan Institute confirmed that the approval granted to the Authors for their research on snakes (Bothrops jararaca) did not include newborn snakes or the use of the ‘soft stepping’ method.” Maybe Feedback is soft-hearted, but we find ourselves agreeing that it is bad to step on baby snakes.
That was unexpectedly nasty, so let’s end with the peace prize, which is “for documenting that we value friends who are vicious to people we dislike”. Researchers conducted surveys showing that people prefer friends who are nice to them and who are generally nice to other people, but they also sometimes value a friend who is prepared to be mean to one’s enemies. Feedback congratulates the researchers for figuring out something that one could learn by watching any romantic comedy. Or, to quote Willow Rosenberg: “That’s the best friend’s job: vilifying and grousing”.
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