{
  "abstract": "The Beatles’ cultural influence reaches well beyond music into television, fashion, and global media. As we show, it reaches into scientific publishing too. This study documents how often Beatles song titles and lyrics appear in academic article titles, identifying 2,237 exact references and 963 instances of creative wordplay in data from Scopus. Working from a curated list of Beatles songs and lyrics, we combine automated title queries with large-language-model screening, followed by manual verification, to detect both exact references and wordplay. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically identify wordplay on Beatles song titles and lyrics in scientific article titles. We report which titles and lyrics are referenced most often, trace how their use has grown over the decades, and show that this growth has outpaced the expansion of the scientific literature as a whole while varying systematically across disciplines. The result is the first large-scale, cross-disciplinary account of how the Beatles have left their mark on scientific writing.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands",
    "Koninklijke KPN N.V., Rotterdam, The Netherlands",
    "Unit ICT, Strategy & Policy, TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), The Hague, The Netherlands"
  ],
  "article_type": "Research Article",
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 3,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Gabriel Budel"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Robert E. Kooij"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Michiel Tjepkema"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/e2y70n98jzk0v.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.1371/journal.pone.0356147",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "e2y70n98jzk0v",
  "issns": [
    "1932-6203"
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  "landing_url": "https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356147",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "journal",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
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      "openalex",
      "1804|scientometrics and bibliometrics research"
    ],
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      "/Biology and life sciences/Anatomy/Head/Eyes"
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      "/Biology and life sciences/Psychology/Cognitive psychology/Perception/Sensory perception/Vision"
    ],
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      "/Medicine and health sciences/Anatomy/Head/Eyes"
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      "plos",
      "/Medicine and health sciences/Anatomy/Ocular system/Eyes"
    ],
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      "plos",
      "/Medicine and health sciences/Immunology/Vaccination and immunization"
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      "/Medicine and health sciences/Public and occupational health/Preventive medicine/Vaccination and immunization"
    ],
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      "/Research and analysis methods/Database and informatics methods/Database searching"
    ],
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      "/Research and analysis methods/Research assessment/Bibliometrics"
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      "plos",
      "/Research and analysis methods/Research assessment/Citation analysis"
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      "/Social sciences/Psychology/Cognitive psychology/Language"
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      "/Social sciences/Psychology/Cognitive psychology/Perception/Sensory perception/Vision"
    ],
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      "plos",
      "/Social sciences/Sociology/Culture"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7212024399",
  "pdf_url": "https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0356147&type=printable",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-09",
  "publisher": "Public Library of Science",
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/e2y70n98jzk0v.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:17:56Z",
      "native_id": "10.1371/journal.pone.0356147",
      "source": "plos",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356147"
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  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "plos:immunology",
      "subfield": "immunology"
    },
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "plos:neuroscience",
      "subfield": "neuroscience"
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    {
      "field": "medicine",
      "origin": "plos:anatomy",
      "subfield": "physiology"
    }
  ],
  "title": "How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles: Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature using large language models",
  "title_text": "How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles: Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature using large language models",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:17:56Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/e2y70n98jzk0v",
  "venue": "PLOS One",
  "versions": []
}