How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles: Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature using large language models

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.