How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles: Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature using large language models
- 1Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
- 2Koninklijke KPN N.V., Rotterdam, The Netherlands
- 3Unit ICT, Strategy & Policy, TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), The Hague, The Netherlands
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.
Related
- The Functional Neurological Disorder, Volume 1: Non-systematic review from the scientific literature
- A protocol for a scoping review of language and cultural considerations when screening, assessing, and caring for people living with dementia or mild cognitive impairment from minoritised ethnic groups
- Does low confidence drive reliance on AI, or does reliance erode confidence? A four-wave RI-CLPM study of chinese language and literature undergraduates
- Cultural and social drivers of human genetic variation
- Universality Meets Cultural Nuances: Affective Responses to Rhythmic and Harmonic Complexity Across Cultures
BibTeX
@article{budel2026science,
title = {{How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles: Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature using large language models}},
author = {Gabriel Budel and Robert E. Kooij and Michiel Tjepkema},
journal = {PLOS One},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0356147},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356147},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles: Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature using large language models
AU - Gabriel Budel
AU - Robert E. Kooij
AU - Michiel Tjepkema
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/09
JO - PLOS One
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0356147
UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356147
AB - 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.
SN - 1932-6203
ER -