An original Apple Records single sleeve of "The Long and Winding Road," photographed among other Beatles records. (Credit: Ramon Dorenbos, CC-BY 4.0)
From Long COVID to ChatGPT, Beatles Wordplay Runs Through Science
In A Nutshell
- A new PLOS One study found more than 3,000 scientific article titles that borrow words or lyrics from the Beatles: 2,237 exact references plus 963 instances of wordplay.
- “The Long and Winding Road” is the single most borrowed phrase, showing up in 798 titles, more than the top ten songs of Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley combined.
- The 2017 paper “Attention is all you need,” which introduced the architecture behind ChatGPT, plays on the Beatles lyric “Love is all you need.”
- Researchers used an AI language model to flag candidate titles, then manually checked every single one by hand to confirm it was a genuine Beatles pun.
Somewhere in the vast pile of published science sits a patent law article called ‘Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my patented monkey.’ It is not alone. The band’s own name was itself a play on words, a mash-up of “beat” and “beetles.” A new study in PLOS One found that same appetite for wordplay has spread into the driest corners of science: more than three thousand scientific article titles that borrow words or lyrics from the Beatles, spanning fields from medicine to quantum computing to law.
Researchers Gabriel Budel, Robert E. Kooij, and Michiel Tjepkema scoured the academic database Scopus and identified 2,237 exact references to Beatles songs and lyrics in paper titles, plus another 963 instances of creative wordplay. To catch the trickier puns, the team used a large language model to flag candidate titles, then checked every flagged title by hand.
References Turn Up in Every Field From Medicine to Law
These references are not confined to any single corner of science. Medicine and the social sciences dominate, but the pattern reaches fields as varied as computer science, economics, environmental science, and the arts and humanities. Budel calls some of the puns genuinely brilliant. “‘The lung and winding road’ is a paper on Long COVID that changes one vowel,” he says. “‘Here comes the SU(N)’ turns ‘Here Comes the Sun’ into a quantum computing paper about mathematical groups. Someone was having a very good day at their desk.”
Checking that pile of puns was no small task. “The funniest part of the job was also the most tedious,” Budel says. “The language model flagged thousands of candidate titles, and the three of us then read every single flagged title by hand to decide whether it was really a Beatles pun. We sat there arguing about whether ‘You say you want a resolution’ counts. It does.”
This habit wasn’t spread evenly across history, either. Use of Beatles references in article titles stayed rare until around 1990, then climbed sharply between 1995 and 2005, even after accounting for the overall growth of scientific publishing during that stretch. Growth has since leveled off, suggesting the habit has settled in rather than kept accelerating.
‘The Long and Winding Road’ Tops the List
One song stood far above the rest. “The Long and Winding Road” showed up in 798 article titles, the single most borrowed Beatles phrase in scientific writing, followed by “With a Little Help from My Friends” at 209 and “Here, There and Everywhere” at 129. That figure also settles a small academic dispute: an earlier paper had claimed the Clash song “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” was referenced more often in scientific titles, at 408 mentions. The new count puts that Clash song at just 561 total references, well behind the Beatles classic. Compared with the two other best-selling acts in music history, the gap is even starker: the top ten Beatles songs appear in 1,584 article titles, versus just 65 for Michael Jackson’s top ten and 196 for Elvis Presley’s.
Kooij, a network scientist, notes that this kind of skew is familiar. “As network scientists we’re used to seeing power laws in earthquakes, in social networks, in wealth,” he says. “It turns out references to Beatles songs follow one too: a handful of songs are cited constantly and the bulk of them are used once or twice.”
Not every scientist plays it straight, either. Tjepkema, who teaches law and co-hosts a Beatles podcast, points out a running irony. “What strikes me most is that scientists tend to invert the Beatles’ optimism,” he says. “‘With a little help from my enemies,’ ‘Although it helps, love is not all you need.’ The songs are hopeful; the papers are skeptical.”
A Beatles Lyric Sits Inside ChatGPT’s Founding Paper
Among all the wordplay, one thread stands out for its reach into everyday technology. Before 2017, a handful of papers already played on “Love is all you need,” including a 2001 paper called “RNA Is All You Need.” Then came “Attention is all you need,” cited 89,737 times on Scopus and among the most influential papers of the century, which introduced the Transformer architecture behind large language models like ChatGPT.
Budel sees a fitting irony in how the search itself was carried out. “We used a small language model to hunt for Beatles wordplay, and its weak point was attribution: it knew a pun when it saw one, but couldn’t reliably tell you which song it came from,” he says. “Newer models handle that easily. The models born out of ‘Attention is all you need’ learned to hear ‘Love is all you need’ faster than we could finish the paper.”
Researchers see a practical lesson underneath the fun. A well-chosen cultural reference can make a technical paper more memorable, so long as the allusion still fits the content and doesn’t get in the way of readers finding it. More than five decades after the band broke up, its songs are still turning up in the titles of papers on subjects the Beatles never could have imagined.
Paper Notes
Limitations
Study authors note several limits to their approach. Their search covered only publication titles indexed in Scopus, so it inherits whatever gaps exist in that database’s coverage. The lyric analysis relied on a curated set of phrases rather than every possible line from every Beatles song, meaning the true number of references is likely higher than what was reported. The team’s strict matching rules, designed to avoid false positives, also meant that some genuine references, especially those involving short or common phrases, were left out. Finally, while the AI tool used to detect wordplay was checked against independent human judgment, it remained imperfect, tending to miss some genuine puns rather than wrongly flag fake ones, meaning the wordplay counts reported are, if anything, conservative. The authors also note that their citation figures are descriptive and do not prove that Beatles references cause papers to be cited more often.
Funding and Disclosures
The authors reported that they received no specific funding for this work. They also declared that no competing interests exist.
Publication Details
The study, titled “How science gets by with a little help from the Beatles: Detecting cultural wordplay in scientific literature using large language models,” was written by Gabriel Budel, Robert E. Kooij, and Michiel Tjepkema. It was published in PLOS One, volume 21, issue 9 (2026), article e0356147. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356147.
